The Spa at Pebble Beach has been one of my favorite places to visit since it first opened in 1999. For over 25 years, I’ve returned again and again for massages, hair appointments, and relaxing days spent in the picturesque courtyard, yet I had never experienced its Lasapa Lelima Purification Treatment until the spa recently invited me to try it.
The timing was uncanny. I’ve been moving through a period of transition in both my personal and professional life. Like so many of the spiritual moments I’ve experienced, this invitation arrived exactly when I needed it. I was grateful for the stress relief, and even more grateful for the blessing and sense of protection that came with it.
As I tend to have a penchant for places that have deep historical roots, the property’s own background has always intrigued me. Long before it welcomed spa guests, Casa Palmero was a private Mediterranean estate, built in the 1920s. Pebble Beach Company purchased the property and restored it with great care, opening it in 1999 as an intimate 24-room resort with the spa alongside.
Even today, the two-story, 22,000-square-foot spa retains the atmosphere of a grand family home, and the attention paid to preserving its original character is part of what makes a visit feel so grounding.
While most day spas offer a few relaxing spaces to indulge in (like a ladies’ lounge or sauna), this venue is so spacious that you can easily relax here from morning until evening, long after your service ends.
A day here includes time to enjoy the spa’s amenities before or after a treatment. I like to begin in the whirlpool, steam room, and sauna, then spend a few minutes breathing deeply in the inhalation room beside its wall of Himalayan rock salt.
There’s also a cold plunge, an outdoor pool surrounded by swaying palm trees, and two lounges for resting between services: the Conservatory, which is filled with lush greenery and light pouring in through the glass ceiling, and the Sanctuary, where guests settle in beside an indoor fire pit with tea, fresh juice, and light snacks.
The Juice Bar offers smoothies and wholesome lunch options (like my go-to veggie wrap and green salad) for anyone who wants to stay a while.
The spa has earned a Forbes Five-Star rating, and the resort’s wellness offerings reach beyond the treatment rooms, including crystal singing bowl sound baths and a monthly floating sound bath held in the pool under the full moon.
I’ve come to learn that the Esselen were a small Native community whose ancestral homeland lies here in Monterey County. So much of their history was lost that the name we use for them today was taken from Spanish accounts of a local village, and what they originally called themselves remains largely unknown.
Contact with Europe began when Spanish explorers arrived in the early 1600s. In 1770, the founding of Mission San Carlos brought a campaign to convert the Esselen to Christianity.
Within a few decades, their population and traditions had been severely diminished, and they became one of the earliest Native groups in California to endure such a steep decline. Yet the Esselen legacy endured.
It lives on through archaeological sites across the region and through descendants who continue to honor their heritage. The Esselen Tribe of Monterey County remains dedicated to safeguarding its history and preserving its culture for future generations.
For these reasons, Pebble Beach Resorts wanted to honor their history, heritage, and culture. To do this, the Lasapa Lelima Purification Treatment was created by Cari Herthel, Vice Chair and medicine woman of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey County, who once worked at The Spa.
She conceived the ritual and trained the spa’s practitioners to perform it, giving her tribe’s healing traditions a lasting place within the spa, as a way to honor the Esselen tribe’s lasting influence over the region.
Over 100 minutes, the ritual draws on thousands of years of Native American beliefs and customs. It’s designed to act as a holistic treatment by creating a mind, body, spirit connection for the client.
To do this, the treatment includes an emotionally moving ritual, including physical cleansing and relaxation techniques, mental renewal, and even energetic protection.
Bringing the natural environment into the treatment, locally grown coastal white sage, cypress, and elderberry are key elements that are incorporated into the experience.
The practitioner also conducts a “Four Directions” ceremonial blessing, performed with traditional instruments in honor of the earth and the ancestors, along with a body scrub, a rinse beneath the Vichy shower, and a massage that releases the tension in the muscles and settles the nerves.
A scrub and a massage are easy to find at almost any spa. What distinguishes this treatment is its intention and its cultural reverence. During the blessing, I was keenly aware that I was taking part in a ceremony tied to the land just beyond the spa’s walls, and to the people who tended to the Monterey Peninsula for thousands of years before Pebble Beach existed. The sage, the water, and the ceremony itself all carried symbolic weight, and the experience became cathartic and transformative in a way I hadn’t expected.
I’ve visited The Spa at Pebble Beach more times than I can count, but this particular visit impacted me in a different way than ever before. In a season of profound change and evolution, I found comfort in a ritual built on renewal and protection, and in the reminder that the place I’ve loved for most of my life holds a much older story.
By weaving the traditions of the Esselen people’s culture and spiritual beliefs into its most meaningful treatment, The Spa at Pebble Beach honors two histories at once: that of a restored 1920s estate, and that of the first people to call this coastline home. While a spa day in Pebble Beach is always a rejuvenating experience, I have to admit that this treatment left me feeling lighter, restored, and ready for whatever comes next in life.
[Disclosure: Complimentary media access c/o The Spa at Pebble Beach. Image credits: Christina-Lauren Pollack. All opinions are my own.]