The Hot Springs
Hot Springs Access
• Registered guests of Harrison Hot Springs Resort are given wristbands to grant access to their five mineral pools. Visit Hot Springs Pools for more information.
• The Public Mineral Pool is an indoor pool, conveniently located at the intersection of Hot Springs Rd. and Esplanade Ave. This facility is owned and operated by the Harrison Hot Springs Resort. Please call 604.796.2244 Ext. 5 for more information, including hours of operation.
• A natural outdoor hot spring is not available for public use within the Village of Harrison Hot Springs. The water pooled beside the source building is a mixture of lake, rain, and mineral water—not a pure hot spring source. Please respect all signage and do not enter the water at this site.
History of the Hot Springs
If you’re searching for hot springs in BC, discover the soothing mineral waters of Harrison Hot Springs—revered as the “healing place” by the Sts’ailes People for thousands of years, long before their discovery by Europeans in the 1800s.
Settlers are said to have ‘discovered’ the hot springs in 1858 while en route to the gold fields. Their boat capsized, and expecting to meet their doom in the frigid waters, they instead discovered that the lake at that spot was not freezing but rather warm. Sts’ailes First Nation called the Hot Springs Qwólts, meaning boiling water. The hot springs were revered as a “healing place” by local Indigenous Peoples, who travelled by canoe to benefit from their waters.
It was later called St. Alice’s Well after one of the daughters of British Columbia’s first governor. Eventually, the name changed to Harrison Hot Springs, after Benjamin Harrison, a deputy governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1835 to 1839. The St. Alice Hotel and Bath House were built soon after the railroad reached Harrison Mills in 1885, and Harrison Hot Springs has been a resort destination ever since. You can read about it at Hot Springs of British Columbia.
Hot Spring Pools
The two types of hot springs in the area are Potash and Sulphur, which are 40 degrees C (104 degrees F) and 62 degrees C (145 degrees F), respectively. The water is pumped from one of the springs and cooled, providing natural, healing mineral water to both the public mineral pool and the resort pools, pictured below.
The Harrison Hot Springs Resort has five pools altogether, with two indoors and three outdoors, each with temperatures tailored for a different experience.
