What it’s like inside a spa run by the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians

Forget Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra for a minute. Forget mid-century modern design and consignment stores selling Cher’s old pool statues. Even forget the Coachella music festival, because unless you know about the sacred portal to the underworld, you haven’t begun to understand Palm Springs.

Few people leaving the frozen yoghurt store on the corner of Indian Canyon Drive and Tahquitz Canyon Way realise they are near the mouth of the sacred Séc-he spring. This spring (meaning “the sound of boiling water” in the Cahuilla language) gave Palm Springs its eventual name and is located, unadvertised, under the paving stones on the corner of the recently constructed Agua Caliente Cultural Plaza. These waters have been central to the lives of the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians, whose ancestors inhabited these lands thousands of years before Palm Springs became a playground for the rich and famous.

Many are familiar with the accepted creation myth of Palm Springs: the place where Hollywood stars of the 1930s could escape from Los Angeles and have fun. But according to Cahuilla legend, everything began when a sickly leader called Tu-to-meet struck the ground with his staff and a boiling mineral spring emerged. When Tu-to-meet descended into this watery underworld, he encountered powerful spirits called “Nukatem.” Finally, he met the mighty Blue Frog, who cured his illness and gave him renewed life force.

There has been a spa hotel in this location since the 1960s. But the 5.8-acre plaza takes things to a new level. It contains a new museum, a magnificent new spa and lush, water-fed gardens replicating the nearby ‘Indian Canyons’ which form part of the tribe’s 31,500 acres of reservation land (including 6,700 within the city of Palm Springs.)

If you’re going to The Spa at Séc-he thinking that it will be filled with lots of Native American bells and whistles: feathers, crystals, beads and mysterious Indigenous treatments, you will be disappointed. There are some subtle touches from the tribe’s history: stone floors are based on ancient designs from pots and baskets. But “treatments” for the Agua Caliente meant simply bathing in the revered spring water. And that’s what you get to do here. The 73,000-square-foot spa has all the features you’d expect from a luxury wellness retreat, including flotation tanks, salt caves and an acoustic wellness lounge. But the heart and soul of the place lies in 22 private bath cabins which contain the healing water. Entering one of these cabins feels like going into an airy chapel. It also feels like stepping back in time as you lower yourself into the water, which smells sulphury but not overly so.

The chairman of the Agua Caliente tribe, Reid Milanovich, 41, tells me that the water is 12,000 years old. This refers to the time it takes for the snow to melt down from the top of the nearby San Jacinto mountains and find its way into a chamber located 8,000 feet below the surface of the earth (opposite the frozen yoghurt store.) Pressure forces the water back up through a mineral-filled rock chimney at a temperature of 105 degrees at a rate of 24 gallons per minute. Geological experts have confirmed that the Séc-he spring is not connected to the Coachella Valley aquifer which is where most of the hotels, spas and homes of Palm Springs get their water.

Yet as I soak, my feelings go beyond science and geography. I can’t believe I’m getting to do what Indigenous people were doing thousands of years ago. And I feel unexpectedly moved as I start to think how hard-won this water is.

After the US gained control of California in 1848, it became legal to enslave the local population. Another law gave settlers the right to kill Native Americans. As if this wasn’t enough, in 1863 a smallpox epidemic killed more than 80 per cent of the Cahuilla population. It is hard to say the scale of the genocide, but before European contact, the Cahuilla population was estimated to be around 15,000. According to the census of 1910 there were 754 Cahuilla in California. Today there are around 4,000 Cahuilla split into nine nations including the Agua Caliente tribe.

When the Agua Caliente Indian reservation was established in 1876, even-numbered plots of land went to the tribe while odd-numbered plots went to new settlers. By luck, or whatever else you choose to believe in, the one-mile square of land which contains the Séc-he hot spring was an even number.

The ceilings in the bath cabin are high and acoustics are great. This turns out to be a good thing as I find myself softly repeating the word “me-yah-whae,” the Cahuilla for “hello,” until it becomes a sort of mantra. I learned the word from Milanovich who also told me about the “Cahuilla bingo nights” the tribe has introduced to bring the language back to life.

So many spa experiences bill themselves as “sacred” these days, but this tub of water really is. I feel moved as I sit there, repeating me-yah-whae and literally soaking in the past. Before she left the earth to become the moon, another character in the Cahuilla creation myth, Menil, instructed the people to bathe every evening.

Afterwards, I go outside to the large communal mineral pool. (The other watering holes, including the swimming pool, hold regular water.) The mountains I’m looking at are the San Jacinto range, which includes Tahquitz Canyon, the big daddy of the “Indian Canyons” and another holy of holies for the tribe. Tahquitz was the first Agua Caliente shaman made by Mukat, the creator of all things. He went rogue so his people banished him to the canyon that now bears his name. It is said that his spirit still lives here, perceptible when rumblings are heard deep within the rocks. A great adjunct to The Spa at Séc-he is a visit to these canyons with their waterfalls, rock art, running streams, lizards and frogs and the world’s largest reserve of hairy-trunked Washintonia filifera palm trees, the only palm native to the Western United States.

Milanovich is arrestingly good-looking with an air of reflective calm. His face lights up as he talks of the times as a child when his father Richard, chairman of the tribe for 28 years, would pick up Kentucky Fried Chicken and then drive him and his siblings out to the Indian Canyons.

“We’d sit and just listen to the sounds. He taught us what the animals were and what the plants were used for: creosote, acorns, pinyon pines. At the time I didn’t realise how special this was.”

Milanovich is optimistic about the future. It’s not just that we are entering an age ripe for telling untold stories (check out the success of Scorsese’s recent Killers of the Flower Moon about the Oklahoma Osage tribe) but that Indigenous people are finally doing the telling themselves. “It’s not the Smithsonian recounting our story,” he says of the museum adjacent to the spa which opened in late 2023. “It’s us.”

He hopes people coming to the spa don’t just see another wellness space. “Because this water really does heal. And every drop has our story in it.”

I’m not sure that the group of young women draped on sun loungers sipping Blue Banana smoothies from the bar realise how lucky they are to be here today. But the knowledge will gradually trickle down, just as the snow continues to do so from the top of the San Jacinto mountains into the underworld of the sacred spring.