The Pool Wing at the Copacabana Palace has been shut all year. It opens again on 3 November, five storeys of it given over to a Wellness Club, with the only Dior Spa in Latin America on the inside.
The pool is the one everyone photographs. What sits above it has been scaffolded since the spring, and Belmond has now said what went in.
Five floors, five uses. The ground floor holds the fitness centre, split across two rooms and fitted with Technogym’s Artis line, plus a private studio for movement and yoga and a space given over to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, where guests can take instruction in it. Every room in the hotel now comes with a yoga mat, and there are trainers on staff for anyone who would rather not leave the suite.
The second floor is thermal. Saunas, one of them infrared, a steam room, an ice bath and an ice fountain, arranged for contrast therapy. The relaxation lounge next door pours botanical waters and teas and sends out small plates built on Brazilian ingredients.
The bar
The Suco Bar works the same seam in liquid form: Brazilian produce, superfoods, and remedies that have been passed along in families for generations. It is positioned as a place to sit rather than a counter to pass, which is consistent with how the rest of the hotel has always behaved.
A hair salon, a barbershop and a Beauty Lounge finish the floorplate. The Beauty Lounge is private and aimed at weddings and events at the hotel, where a party can get ready together using Dior products or bring in its own make-up artists.
The pool at the Copacabana Palace, with the Pool Wing behind it · Courtesy of Belmond
The spa
Dior Spa Copacabana Palace takes six treatment rooms and a retail floor inside the renovated wing. The shop is the only address in Rio carrying La Collection Privée, the haute perfumery line composed by Francis Kurkdjian, and L’Or de Vie, the skincare drawn from extracts of Château d’Yquem. Prestige is there too, built on the Granville rose, which is harvested once a year. The Dior Maison wellness line makes its Brazilian debut on the same shelves.
The signature treatment was written for this address. The Healing Heart Ceremony uses semi-precious stones set vibrating against sound therapy tools, singing bowls among them, and takes the ocean as its reference point.
Dior has been coming to this stretch of sand for sixty-five years. Marc Bohan, creative director of the house from 1960 to 1989, showed an Haute Couture collection in the Palace gardens in 1961. Fourteen years later he put his swimwear collection on Copacabana beach for the camera.
Dior showed couture in these gardens in 1961. It took sixty-five years to take a lease.
The Splendid EditThe doctor
The spa opens with Dr Maria Bussade attached to it. The Brazilian dermatologist founded Bussade Health in São Paulo, and has written two treatments with Dior that exist only here. The Couture Radiance Facial runs massage, dry brushing and micro-current therapy together. The Carioca High Sculpt borrows from the Brazilian body-sculpting tradition and works on tone and shape.
Dior’s own Haute Wellness menu travels with the opening. Kobi-Dior is a facial massage co-written with Hadda Akrim, the house’s international wellness expert, out of the Japanese Kobido method. New Look Dior is the full-body version, sculpting and drainage and micro-stimulation in sequence.
Rio has spent the last few years being talked about as a body-care capital, mostly on the strength of its clinics. The Copacabana Palace has now put the argument inside a 1923 building on the Avenida Atlântica, which is a different kind of claim.
Opening date, Wellness Club composition, Dior Spa treatment rooms and retail lines, signature rituals, the Bussade collaboration and the 1961 and 1975 Dior visits to Rio from the Belmond press release of 6 October 2026, accessed 19 October 2026.
Photography courtesy of Belmond — © Belmond, Copacabana Palace