13 ancient and beautiful forests to give you a bath of health

A conscious and relaxed walk through the forest produces a series of beneficial effects on the body that have been well defined by specialists. Dr. Qin Li, an immunologist at the Tokyo Medical School, highlights the following:

Reduces the production of stress hormones, such as cortisol. Lowers blood pressure. Pain is relieved. Stimulates immunity. Improves sleep, both duration and quality.

Take a forest bath with ancient trees

To get all these benefits we can perform a bath or a forest cure, practice that in Japan is called shinrin-yoku. You can do it in any quiet wooded space, but the benefits are multiplied if you choose an ancient forest.

In ancient forests, inhabited by ancient trees, the variety of plant, animal and fungi species is enormous. They are communities of living beings that have developed collaboratively for thousands of years.

The communication networks between them are infinitely more dense and complex than the internet of human beings. That communication is not made up of just ones and zeros, but of aromatic molecules such as terpenes, emitted by plants, among many others. These molecules are capable of stimulate our defenses as can be seen with the count of “natural killer” cells in our blood after a walk.

In those forests, moreover, the majesty of the trees transports you to another state of consciousness. You forget everything that might worry you, you glimpse other realities. Your mind and your body are in sync with the beats of life.

The oldest forests on Earth are called “original” or “primal” or “primary” or “virgin” forests. They are the masses of trees that have never been injured by human activity and constitute the memory of when forests covered half of the earth’s surface in the Miocene, a period that ended 5 million years ago.

In the Iberian Peninsula there are no forests left that can be considered scientifically primary, but we do have small intact surfaces in the Pyrenees and the Cantabrian mountain range, and it is better to leave them alone.

To take a good bath in the forest and get all the benefits we can visit other old, well-preserved and beautiful forests. Below we show you a selection of the best forests in Spain with simple routes to experience the forest bath.

Choose your forest to make shinrin-yoku