Six Senses Vana: wellness, longevity and a sal forest in the Doon Valley

Six Senses Vana is a wellness retreat on Mussoorie Road, on the edge of Dehradun in the Indian state of Uttarakhand ². It opened in January 2014 on 21 acres of sal forest, and Six Senses, part of IHG Hotels & Resorts, took over its operation in 2023, keeping the founding vision of Veer Singh ¹⁷⁸. In 2026 it was named Regenerative Luxury Branded Hotel of the Year in the Regenera Luxury Awards, and was a finalist for Best Regenerative Governance & Data Transparency ¹. Because Vana sells wellness, and increasingly speaks the language of longevity, it is a useful place to separate the words from the evidence, and the retreat from the valley it sits in.

In conversation, 29 October 2026. Regenera Luxury and Six Senses Vana will hold a joint webinar and public conference on 29 October 2026, in conversation with Jaspreet Singh, the hotel’s General Manager. Details and registration will be announced by Regenera Luxury.

Four words that are not the same

The World Health Organization’s constitution, adopted in 1946, defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity” ⁹. Wellbeing, in that sense, is a condition. The Global Wellness Institute defines wellness differently, as “the active pursuit of activities, choices and lifestyles that lead to a state of holistic health”, and stresses that health, wellbeing and happiness describe a state while wellness is a process ¹⁰. Wellness is what people buy and do: the institute put the global wellness economy at US$6.8 trillion in 2024, up 7.9% on the year before ¹¹.

Longevity is length of life. Healthspan is the part of it lived free of disease. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic estimate the gap between life expectancy and health-adjusted life expectancy at about nine years ¹². Longevity medicine, as it is offered to hotel guests, usually means diagnostics such as biomarker panels and biological-age tests, and programmes intended to narrow that gap.

In his contribution to this section, László Puczkó draws the line that matters for a hotel. Longevity is a lifelong journey in which a stay plays a minor part; lasting results come from habits, repetition and community accountability, and only properties with a tightly focused health scope can credibly claim life-changing effects ²⁰. He expects today’s advanced offers, such as epigenetic tracking and biological-age testing, to become commodities within three to five years ²⁰.

Even the places used to sell long life are contested. The demographer Saul Newman has argued in preprints that clusters of very old people may partly reflect poor record-keeping and pension fraud; Blue Zones researchers rejected this in 2024, citing civil and church records in Sardinia and the national registry in Costa Rica, while accepting that the longevity advantage may be fading among younger generations ¹⁶. Why some people live long is less settled than marketing suggests.

Four traditions, and what the evidence says

Vana’s own site describes four strands: Ayurveda, yoga, Tibetan medicine (Sowa Rigpa), and “natural healing therapies” including reflexology, physiotherapy, acupuncture and Raag therapy ². Its Ayurveda page says the tradition “sees everyone as unique, in constitution and context”, and works on the balance of body doshas and mental gunas through diet, routine and discipline ⁴. On Sowa Rigpa, the retreat describes itself as “one of the few places in the world” where it is formally offered; it says its doctors and therapists are trained at the Men-Tsee-Khang, the Institute of Tibetan Medicine and Astrology in Dharamsala, and that its preparations come from there ³. India recognised Sowa Rigpa as an Indian system of medicine in 2010. The anthropologist Stephan Kloos notes that recognition made it legible to the state but also opened it to the market, turning a struggle to protect it into a contest over who controls it ¹⁵.

The evidence for these traditions as medicine is thin and uneven. The US National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health reports that some small studies suggest Ayurvedic preparations may help with osteoarthritis pain and type 2 diabetes, but “most of these trials are small or not well-designed”, and that some preparations may contain lead, mercury or arsenic in toxic amounts ¹⁴. For time spent in forests, a systematic review of 28 studies found that forest bathing “may significantly improve” physical and psychological health, with the most consistent effects on mood; it also judged the risk of bias “relatively high”, noted that most participants were healthy young adults, and found no study with follow-up visits ¹³.

Vana’s programmes are long by hotel standards. Sleep, Detox and Yoga require at least five nights, Weight Management and Ayurveda 14, and Ayurveda Panchakarma 21; there are also Tibetan Medicine, menopause, and pre- and post-natal programmes ⁶. Stays include full board with guided nutrition, a wellness consultation and screening, and daily treatments ². At launch under Six Senses, the screening was described as measuring 40 biomarkers alongside a doctor’s consultation ⁷. The Weight Management page names “the goal of longevity” ⁶. Programmes of two to three weeks bring Vana closer to Puczkó’s focused properties than to a hotel with a spa, but a programme is still a stay, and no outcome data for guests are published.

A retreat built around a forest

The Journal’s profile lists what the property itself has published: a named sustainability lead, Tanya Roy, director of sustainability, and a Sustainability Lab open to guests; a design by Esteva i Esteva in which no tree was removed; LEED Platinum in 2015, the first retreat in India to achieve it; GSTC certification; no single-use plastic since opening; its own water bottling; rainwater harvesting; and a no-air-freight policy in its kitchens ¹. The Journal classifies these as reported, drawing on a 2023 Six Senses press release and trade press ¹. The hotel’s sustainability page confirms the LEED Platinum date and gives GSTC certification since 2024 ⁵. When Six Senses’ arrival was announced in 2022, trade press reported 82 rooms and 55 treatment and consultation rooms ⁸.

The same page publishes operational figures for 2025: 25,379 cubic metres of wastewater recycled on site, 115,025 single-use plastic bottles avoided through on-site bottling, 72,468 kWh of solar electricity generated, 4,157 kg of produce grown and 9,350 kg of compost made ⁵. With the NGO Nature’s Buddy, it reports recharging 50 forest waterholes with about 150,000 litres of water in 2025 ⁵.

The figures submitted to the Awards

Vana entered all ten Performance categories of the Regenera Luxury Awards and reached the maximum score of 100 out of 100 across all ten; the Journal states it is the only property to do both ¹. The figures it submitted, dated 24 August 2026 and covering 2025 and the first half of 2026, are classed by the Journal as reported and not independently verified ¹:

• Local value: 85% of procurement from suppliers within 50 km; 100% of food and beverage from local, organic, regenerative or small-scale producers; 95% of the workforce hired locally; 95% of management and supervisory roles held by local residents ¹.
• Guests: 100% taking part in local, cultural, wellness or nature programmes; 95.4% satisfaction in an internal survey; 4.8 out of 5 on review platforms ¹.
• Purkul Watershed Project, since 2024: 145 households with reliable access to safe drinking water; two springs rejuvenated, serving 28 households; 10 ha of farmland irrigated for 113 farming households; 2,200 native trees planted on 5.5 ha of restored forest; 152 households with improved food security through kitchen gardens; 217 farmers trained in climate-smart agriculture; 21 vermicompost units; 90% women’s representation in Village Development Committees ¹.

The hotel’s own site, describing the same work with the People’s Science Institute to the end of 2025, gives different numbers: two springs and five hectares of irrigation restored, about 800,000 litres of rainwater harvested a year, 2,000 native trees over 3.5 ha, 132 kitchen gardens producing about 10 tonnes of vegetables, 856 fruit plants, and nine Village Development Committees with 90% women’s representation ⁵. The Journal’s figures include six more months, which may explain the difference; neither source says so.

The Doon Valley around the retreat

Dehradun lies in the Doon Valley in the Himalayan foothills, close to Rishikesh ⁷. It is growing fast. The 2011 census counted about 578,000 people in the city; by 2020 municipal authorities said it had passed 800,000, and one local foundation estimated more than 1.2 million ¹⁷. Roads and high-rises have replaced paddy fields; the Bindal and Rispana rivers have become drains; in 2017 the city produced more than 165 million litres of sewage a day, of which four plants treated about 18 million; and in 2019 the district administration told the state High Court that 270 acres of water bodies and canals had been encroached upon ¹⁷. A 2016 article by a researcher at the People’s Science Institute, the organisation the hotel now works with in Purkul, cited press reports that groundwater supplies more than 80% of the valley’s drinking water and that the water table had fallen by 8 metres ¹⁹. In 2026 the writer and former diplomat Navtej Sarna described thousands of mature trees felled for roads, an expressway and other projects, a planned cut of 4,000 trees on the Dehradun–Rishikesh highway paused, and sal trees that take about 80 years to mature ¹⁸.

In this valley, the claims that matter most for a retreat are about water and forest, not treatment menus. Keeping 21 acres of sal standing, recycling wastewater, recharging springs and waterholes, and hiring locally are measures that act on the valley’s own pressures. That is the test we apply in how to choose a regenerative hotel, and the reason regenerative hotels are judged by what changes beyond their boundary.

What is still not public

• Independent verification. The Journal’s figures are reported by the property and have not been independently verified; commercial figures are not published because Vana entered as a confidential entrant ¹.
• Absolute numbers. Percentages for local hiring and sourcing are given without headcounts, wages or spend.
• A water balance. Recycled wastewater and harvested rainwater are reported, but not total consumption or groundwater drawn.
• Purkul’s baseline. No baseline, independent evaluation or reconciliation of the two sets of figures is public, and the partner’s own reporting was not found.
• Guest outcomes. No data on health outcomes or follow-up after a programme are published.

For how Regenera Luxury reads figures like these, see its methodology; for the wider idea, what is regenerative luxury?