Hotel Los Naranjos

Los Naranjos is a three-star resort of about 50 rooms in two long, low wings with green roofs, on its own in the fields off Route 3, about 15 km south of the centre and a few minutes by car from the Termas del Daymán park. From the air it is a pair of pools, a tennis court, a palm-lined drive and campo in every direction.

It is the Daymán option for people who want their own pools and silence at night rather than a room inside the village. The municipal park, with the hottest pools in the department, is the day out; the hotel is where you come back to.

There are two outdoor pools of hot-spring water with a pool bar, shade and loungers between them, and a third indoors, closed in and heated, which guests describe as open around the clock. The rest: a gym, a games room, a tennis court, gardens with a solarium, and rooms for events. Booking also lists a spa with massages and a sauna.

Cáscara Bistró, the restaurant inside the hotel, serves the chef's own cooking (cocina de autor), coffee and drinks, and the buffet breakfast is included. The rooms are doubles with one bed or two, triples and a suite, all with air conditioning, TV and a minibar, some with a balcony. The reviews on the booking sites agree on two things: the place is quiet and the pools are clean and warm. Several add that the rooms are dated and the last kilometre of road is rough.

Termas del Daymán is the hot-springs park most visitors to Salto come for, 10 km south of the city on the Daymán river: pools of different temperatures in a garden, the hottest of them the one locals call the reuma pool, where nobody lasts many minutes. You pay at the gate. Acuamanía, the water park with slides next to it, has its own ticket and its own season.

The village around the park has the hotels and guesthouses with their own pools, the restaurants and the bus from the city. Los Naranjos sits outside all that, in the fields.