A copper-coloured dome in the Costa Rican rainforest is the centrepiece of The Vessyl, a new wellness resort in La Fortuna that calls itself the world's first 4D sound resort. Opened in August on 118 acres beneath the Arenal Volcano, it takes just 32 guests at a time — a small, tech-leaning experiment in whether sound you can feel, not just hear, can actually reset a frazzled nervous system.
The resort's showpiece took 11 and a half years to develop with Grammy-winning acoustician George Augspurger. Its floating floor is embedded with 24 transducers — the same technology used in Disney and Universal rides — so vibration travels through your body alongside spatial audio and projections on a curved ceiling. Sessions range from vibrational yoga and sound baths to somatic breathwork that one facilitator described as the closest thing to a psychedelic experience without drugs.
The digital angle goes further. A Bio-Well scanner, developed by Russian physicist Konstantin Korotov, reads your fingerprints and spits out graphs of your stress, energy distribution and even biorhythms — the writer was startled to see her lowest readings match the weeks spent at a neurologist with her dying dog. Guests can also sign up for a 'human design' reading, a personal mapping system invented in 1987 that blends the Kabbalah, the I Ching, numerology, chakras and quantum physics into a birth-data-based bodygraph. It's having a moment on TikTok, and at The Vessyl the personalised session audio is partly scripted by AI.
The writer's verdict was refreshingly mixed. The high-tech sessions occasionally felt like being inducted into a cult, and the vague AI-generated 'higher self' monologue prompted her to wonder whether all this self-quantification is just self-optimisation in nicer clothes. What landed hardest was the low-tech part: an hour sitting outside with a facilitator, talking plainly about relationships, ageing and fear. She left realising she already knew most of what her bodygraph claimed to reveal.
Context matters here too. Costa Rica's wellness industry has grown 58% since 2019, according to the Global Wellness Institute, and the La Fortuna area — a three-hour drive from San José through lush highland roads — is its natural home. The Vessyl's open-air lobby frames the volcano through cloud, an infinity pool faces the cone, and guests stay in stilted wooden tree houses with panoramic terraces. Founder Josh Stanley, previously part of the family behind the Charlotte's Web hemp strain that helped kickstart the CBD movement, clearly knows how to sell a practice before it goes mainstream.
Who is this for? Anyone bored of the sauna-and-cold-plunge circuit and curious about the frontier where wellness meets biohacking — plus travellers who want Arenal's waterfalls, hot springs and jungle with a genuinely unusual activity bolted on. Sceptics will find plenty to poke at, but the combination of rainforest solitude, small guest numbers and an honest shot at sitting quietly with your own thoughts is a harder sell to argue with.
Reported by Condé Nast Traveler.
