Not every wellness destination is new. Some have been in the business for a long, like really long, time. Baden-Baden, which loosely translates as baths-baths, is on the edge of Germany’s Black Forest and has been sending people into hot water since Roman times.
It’s also easy to include in a trip you may already be planning. The town sits a few miles from the Rhine, where many river cruises stop, and it’s about an hour by train from Strasbourg and about 90 minutes from Frankfurt Airport.
Romans built baths over the springs, and you can still visit the ruins beneath the old town. In the 1800s, the elite spent their summers in Baden-Baden, and it became known as Europe’s summer capital. In 2021, UNESCO named it one of Europe’s eleven Great Spa Towns. Mark Twain visited in 1878 and reported that he didn’t care much for the place. “It is an inane town, filled with sham, and petty fraud, and snobbery,” he wrote, “but the baths are good.”
Twain meant the Friedrichsbad, which opened the year before he arrived and still runs today. A full session takes about three hours. There are 17 stations, and you move from warm air to hot air to steam. If you want, you can add a brush scrub, then work through a series of pools that get cooler as you go, ending in a cold plunge. After that, you lie down under warm blankets in a quiet room.
One thing to be prepared for: Most days the Friedrichsbad is nude, and men and women bathe together. If that’s not for you, even knowing you’ll never see these people again, there are swimsuit days on Wednesdays and Saturdays, a rule added in 2024. Entry is €38 and includes slippers, towels, lotions, and a cup of tea in the reading room at the end.
Next door is the Caracalla Spa, named for the Roman emperor who is reported to have bathed in these waters. It is newer and brighter, with indoor and outdoor thermal pools and a waterfall. A three-hour visit costs €25. Both bathhouses draw on the same dozen springs, which come out of the ground at more than 55°C, or 131°F.
Between soaks, the town is made for slow walking. “The place is frozen in time,” Daniel Zamani, artistic director of the Museum Frieder Burda, told W magazine last year. The Lichtentaler Allee follows the little Oos river past old villas and gardens, and the casino in the Kurhaus, where Dostoevsky lost much of his money in 1867, is still in business. The tourism office came up with a witty slogan for the town, “The good-good life,” a nod to the name.
Two nights gives you a morning at each bathhouse and an evening in between. With more time, the Black Forest High Road starts at the edge of town and follows the ridge south. From late November, there’s a Christmas market outside the Kurhaus.
Trains stop at Baden-Baden station, about 7 kilometers from the center, and buses run from there into town. Twain, for his part, wrote, “I fully believe I left my rheumatism in Baden-Baden.”
