Quirky Guide

Large amounts of salt can be bad for you − unless that salt is smothered on walls and pumped out of a machine in a clinic.

Resembling the inside of a sugar cube, the UK’s first ‘salt cave’, located in London, offers drug-free treatment that can help combat respiratory illnesses, sleeping disorders and skin conditions.

Salt from the Red Sea covers the floor, ocean sounds are piped through speakers, and sensors balance the salt levels in the air. Patients simply relax for an hour at a time and breathe normally.

Similar treatment has existed for some 200 years, with impaired breathers in Eastern Europe and Russia spending several hours a day in subterranean salt grottos. However, it’s unlikely such grottos came with snazzy hairnets and feet covers.