Europe’s spa towns are enchanted places. Their magic comes principally from the effervescent natural springs which bubble up from the ground and are channelled into drinking fountains and baths for healing purposes. Long patronised by royalty and aristocrats in search of a cure, they have retained their elegance and quirky old-fashioned ambience.
1. Bath
Britain’s best-known spa town provided a model followed across Europe of combining medical treatments with entertainments and diversions. Bath’s famous master of ceremonies, Beau Nash, established the combination of etiquette and excess that made spa towns centres of both health and hedonism. The original Roman baths can still be visited and you can swim in the naturally warm thermal mineral waters, which emerge at a temperature of 46° Centigrade, at the Thermae Bath Spa.
2. Buxton
Known as England’s ‘mountain spa’ and standing on the edge of the Derbyshire Peak District, Buxton is the only place in the UK apart from Bath with naturally hot mineral waters. Mary Queen of Scots, allowed to make visits there during fourteen years of imprisonment in various nearby strongholds, found them effective in alleviating spinal pain after a fall from her horse. A newly opened hotel in the restored Georgian Crescent offers traditional spa bathing and treatments.
3. Harrogate
The North Yorkshire spa town claims to have the largest concentration of natural mineral springs anywhere in Britain. Most of them are found in the Valley Gardens, a park which runs beside a stream. Its ‘stinking wells’, first discovered in 1571, have a high concentration of sulphur. A seventeenth-century medical treatise claimed that despite smelling of rotten eggs, they cured a wide range of conditions, ranging from catarrh to cramp and headaches to haemorrhoids.
4. Llandrindod Wells
There is a Brigadoon-like quality about this spa town in mid-Wales which seems to be lost in the mists of time, just as it is frequently also lost in the mists that often descend on the nearby green hills and valleys. Its natural mineral water springs contain significant traces of sodium chloride, sulphur, iron, magnesium, lithium and radium. Ornate Victorian buildings give the impression of a seaside resort and the town hosts an annual Victorian festival.
5. Baden-Baden
Set on the edge of the German Black Forest close to the French border, Baden-Baden was recognised as the leading European spa in the nineteenth century, becoming the favourite resort of emperors, aristocrats, writers and musicians. Its casino was as much an attraction as its baths, not least for the Russian novelist Dostoyevsky, who was hopelessly addicted to the roulette tables. The massive Friedrichsbad provides one of the most authentic spa bathing experiences in Europe.
6. Bad Ischl
Surrounded by mountains in the Salzkammergut (salt chamber) region of Upper Austria, this elegant riverside resort was put on the map by the Emperor Franz Josef, who spent 63 summers there in his Kaiser Villa. It continues to offer all that a historic spa town should in the way of baths, treatment centres, concerts and cafés, with an annual operetta festival and a prevailing air of wistful nostalgia for the days of the Habsburg Empire.
7. Karlovy Vary
Situated in the far west of the Czech Republic, Karlsbad, as it was known in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was dubbed the hospital of Europe and remains one of the European spas most frequented for medical treatments, with a plethora of sanatoria and hotels offering everything from colonic, gum or vaginal irrigation to anti-ageing therapies. Patients promenade through its elegant colonnades, sipping prescribed doses of mineral water from what look like inverted teapots.
The Last Enchanted Places: The Spa Towns of Europe by Ian Bradley is out on 2nd of April 2026 (iconbooks.com).
Words by Ian Bradley
Top image: Bath Abbey from the Roman Baths, Bath, Somerset, England
