Six Spectacular Outdoor Pools for a Snowy Swim

The first time I swam outdoors in falling snow I was in Tokyo in early February, which is not the Japan most people picture. My son was six then, my daughter eleven, and we had spent four days doing the indoor things you do with children when it is three degrees outside. Then someone at our hotel mentioned an onsen with a rotenburo, an open-air bath, and we went, and I have been chasing that feeling ever since. Not the spa feeling. The other one.

What follows is three pieces of advice I keep hearing about winter swimming, tested against what actually happens when you book one.

You need a heated pool, or you will regret it

Mostly true. The pools worth a snowy swim sit somewhere between 38 and 42 degrees Celsius, and below about 30 you are not swimming, you are enduring. I learned this the expensive way at a hotel near Nagano where the outdoor pool was described as “heated” and turned out to be 27 degrees, which sounds fine until you are standing chest-deep in it while snow lands on your shoulders. My daughter lasted four minutes. My son, who is made of sterner stuff, lasted nine and then couldn’t feel his feet.

The trick is that nobody puts the number on the booking page, so you email and ask, and if they won’t tell you, that is your answer. A genuinely hot spring, by contrast, does not need heating at all, which is why the Japanese rotenburo works so well in winter: the water comes out of the ground at temperature. On Hokkaido, where we flew in from Tokyo on a cheap morning hop and paid about ¥11,000 each one way, the outdoor baths at the mountain hotels are the whole reason to go in January rather than July, and the domestic fares into Sapporo drop sharply once the ski season’s opening rush is over. If you are pricing that leg, Kupi.com — Tokyo – Sapporo flights is the search I used to compare the early departures, mostly because I needed four seats on one plane and the filters let me say so.

Cold air makes the swim better, so go when it snows

This one breaks down. A light snowfall over warm water is genuinely magical, and I will not pretend otherwise. But there is a threshold, and it is wind. At minus five with no wind, you can float for twenty minutes. At minus five with a 30 km/h gust, your wet head is the problem, and no amount of hot water fixes a wet head in a gale. The pools that photograph best in the snow are often the ones most exposed to it.

What I check before booking:

• The water temperature, in writing, from the property
• Whether the pool is covered or genuinely open to the sky
• Wind exposure, which usually means asking about the building’s orientation
• Towel and robe access, because the walk back matters more than the swim
• Whether children are allowed at all, and until what hour

That last one catches people. Several Icelandic geothermal pools, including the famous ones, restrict younger children in the evening, and a six-year-old turned away at the gate is a ruined evening.

Book the hotel for the pool, not the pool for the hotel

Wrong, and I wish someone had told me sooner. You book a hotel with a good outdoor pool, and then you discover the pool is open 10am to 4pm, or closed for maintenance in the exact week you are there, or reserved for a private group. January is low season at a lot of European spa hotels, which means closures. The pools attached to actual hot springs, in Japan, Iceland, Hungary, are open because the water is the point of the building, not an amenity bolted onto it.

If there is no geothermal water within reasonable distance, the honest alternative is not flying somewhere with a heated outdoor pool. It is a hotel with an indoor pool, a shorter drive, and a sauna you can reach in a towel. I have done that trip too, and nobody in my family has ever complained about it afterwards.

For a family of four, the answer usually comes down to one question you can ask before paying: how far is the walk from the water to the changing room door? If it is more than about twenty metres, and the wind is up, you will swim once and spend the rest of the trip in the indoor pool anyway.