We Care Spa at 40: Still the Original
Long before the wellness industry learned to monetize fasting, a desert home in California was already doing it rigorously—and well
Down a dirt road about 12 miles north of Palm Springs, past the point where the chain hotels and dispensaries give way to open scrub and Joshua trees, sits We Care Spa. For decades, it has been the kind of place that needs no introduction. There is no grand arrival sequence, no sweeping porte-cochère, no lobby moment. Once through the gates, I parked in a dirt lot surrounded by sage-colored desert brush. The adobe exterior corridor gave way to a glass-floored vitrine of amethyst. I pulled open a giant wooden front door and walked into the large, unhurried core of We Care. What was once Susana Belen’s living room, it remains the gathering place it always was, just with more giant amethysts adorning the walls and a self-serve juice bar straight ahead.
We Care turns 40 this year, and the anniversary arrives at a peculiar cultural moment. McKinsey’s 2025 Future of Wellness survey named healthy aging and longevity as one of six subcategories driving growth across a $2 trillion global wellness market, a category now associated with epigenetic testing kits and the kind of optimization language that treats the body as a system to be tuned rather than restored.
Belen’s approach is, and always has been, rooted in something older and less instrumented: the idea that the body, given the right conditions, can and will deeply reset. Autophagy—the cellular self-repair process that fasting triggers, and the subject of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine—wasn’t yet a household word when she started. And yet We Care has been running essentially this program, in this living room, since 1986.
“I have lived and continue to live by the same principles we teach,” Belen says. “And I have witnessed so many transformations, people who leave here feeling different, feeling better.”
Liquid fasting is the core of the program; despite no solid food for my weeklong stay, there was plenty of nourishment. I subsisted on a rotating menu of 14 juices, soups, teas and shakes, plus an array of supplements, consuming something nearly every hour. Daily colonics, performed by trained hydro therapists, are included in every package. I was skeptical. But somewhere midweek, once the program had taken hold, I began to understand just how much weight—emotional, physical and psychological—my body had been carrying.
The goal, stated plainly, is deep elimination. Every suite and common area bathroom on the property is equipped with a Squatty Potty. There are many, and their placement is very purposeful. When the program is working, and it does work, guests spend a considerable amount of time in them. The daily colonic accelerates this: a 40-minute session of colon hydrotherapy, performed by a trained therapist, that does precisely what it sounds like. The combination of liquid fasting, targeted supplementation and daily colonics creates the conditions for the body to release what it has been holding, sometimes for years. This is, in the end, is why people come to We Care.
Beyond the structured program, the property is threaded with what We Care calls healing installations, a series of structures that sound, on paper, more esoteric than they feel in practice. Morning yoga classes are held outdoors at the open-air Yoga Shala or indoors in the Lotus Room, often beginning with a meditative walk on the labyrinth, a stone path that winds through the grounds. There is also a meditation pyramid, designed to be a space for sitting in stillness. The floating bed, a suspended structure that produces a sensation of weightlessness, is said to increase oxygen levels and stimulate the lymphatic and circulatory systems. While the floating bed made me nauseous, I was a regular visitor to the infrared sauna, lined with a pink Himalayan salt floor, which I made a point of alternating with a brisk outdoor shower—contrast therapy, in the parlance. Next to the oft-empty gym, the lymphatic studio offers Vibratrim machines and weighted hula hoops.
The treatment menu runs deeper still: more than 40 options are available, ranging from Agent Nateur facials and castor oil system recovery wraps to myofascial release in an outdoor tent and shamanic healing sessions. Fire ceremonies happen weekly. I was floored with BioResonance, where real-time brainwave monitoring and harmonic sound frequencies are used to surface patterns linked to stress and anxiety. A treatment that caught me by surprise was the Mayan Rejuvenation. The 90-minute body scrub drew on Tepezcohuite, the bark of the Mimosa tree used by Mayan civilizations for its skin-regenerating properties; We Care combines it with coconut butter, geranium oil and a finishing scalp massage. My skin afterward felt rebuilt.
Guests are encouraged to program as little or as much as their body calls for, and after a day or two without solid food, that calculus tends to shift considerably.
A full renovation completed in 2023 introduced 12 executive suites, each finished with marble surfaces, amethyst accents and floor-to-ceiling windows that open onto private patios bordered by bougainvillea and citrus. Inside, the rooms are stocked daily with fresh-pressed juices (green, carrot, apple, aloe) alongside a rebounder trampoline, in-room yoga mat, circadian light system, air purifier and a deep-soaking tub with dry brush and detox bath powder. I’ve stayed in a lot of great rooms, but this one was intentionally built, and it showed. Every detail, from the light system to the bath powder, was selected to amplify the goal of releasing and resetting.
That intention has a single origin point.
Belen arrived in the California desert as a newly divorced mother of four, physically depleted and dissatisfied with what conventional medicine had to offer. She did not set out to build a retreat. She set out to get well. What followed was years of self-directed study and travel: yoga in Thailand, breathwork in India, nutrition in Greece, juicing practices in Mexico. Then she began sharing what she had learned. Friends came. Then friends of friends. Spare bedrooms became guest rooms, the kitchen a nutrition workshop and her acres of desert land the We Care Spa oasis it is today. Belen is now 88 and still teaches on property several times a week. Her daughter, Susan Lombardi, joined in 1990 after her own health crisis prompted her to leave a career in fashion buying in New York and Paris, and has served as owner and CEO since.
“The name has always been our promise,” Lombardi told COOL HUNTING. “We Care about you. We Care about your health and your well-being.”
Set within 100 acres of high desert, the 20-acre wellness center is located in Desert Hot Springs, which sits at a higher elevation than Palm Springs and has for decades cultivated its own distinct wellness identity, partly on the strength of its geothermal water. We Care draws from this landscape rather than transcending it. The grounds are planted with citrus and studded with Buddhist and Hindu sculpture, prayer ties and shaded meditation alcoves.
There is nothing ironic about We Care, which is itself a kind of distinguishing feature. The program does not hedge or perform self-awareness about its more demanding protocols. It simply asks guests to commit, and it has been asking that long enough to have an answer: many of them come back.
We Care Spa‘s two-night packages start at $2,577 per guest based on double occupancy; solo guests pay more. All packages include the liquid cleanse program, daily colonics, classes and full access to property amenities.
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