The Most Beautiful Public Baths in the World
6 places in 5 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful public baths in the world are Müllersches Volksbad (Germany), Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı (Turkey) and Széchenyi thermal bath (Hungary). The list covers 6 public baths in 5 countries. Turkey has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A public bath was once a city's shared room: the place where people washed, rested and met under one roof. Because they served everyone, the finest were built as civic statements, with domes pierced by star-shaped skylights, marble platforms heated from below, or tiled halls as grand as a theatre. Their beauty lies in how light, steam and stone work together in an interior designed for slow, deliberate use.
This collection spans the Ottoman hammam, the European municipal pool hall and the Japanese bathhouse. In Istanbul, the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı, designed by Mimar Sinan in the 1550s, stands between Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, and Sinan's Çemberlitaş Hamamı still works as a bath. The Sultan Amir Ahmad Bathhouse in Kashan is a Persian interior of tilework and plaster under a roof of small domes. Munich's Müllersches Volksbad, opened in 1901, is a Jugendstil swimming hall with vaulted ceilings, and Budapest's Széchenyi bath sets yellow neo-baroque wings around open-air pools. Dōgo Onsen Honkan in Matsuyama, built in 1894, is a multi-storey wooden bathhouse topped by a small tower.
Each bath here was chosen for how it looks and is ranked by beauty. Every one has its own text, a photograph credited to its author and a place on the map, and the section also opens by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Müllersches Volksbad | Public bath | Germany | |
| 2 | Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı | Public bath | Turkey | |
| 3 | Széchenyi thermal bath | Public bath | Hungary | |
| 4 | Sultan Amir Ahmad Hammam | Public bath | Iran | |
| 5 | Çemberlitaş Hamamı | Public bath | Turkey | |
| 6 | Dōgo Onsen Honkan | Public bath | Japan |
01 Müllersches Volksbad
Germany · 1.1 km from Munich48.132° N 11.588° E
Burkhard Mücke · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Müller'sches Volksbad is a swimming bath that looks like a palace, and it was built for exactly the opposite clientele. The Munich engineer Karl Müller gave the city the money for it on one condition: that it become a bath for the poor, at a time when most working-class homes had nowhere to wash. The architect Carl Hocheder designed it, construction ran from 1897 to 1901, and it opened on 1 May 1901 as, by the reckoning of the day, the largest and most modern swimming bath in the world. More than a century on it is still a working public pool run by the city utilities, and it is regularly counted among the most beautiful bathhouses in Europe.
Did you know? In the basement there was once a bath for dogs, which stayed in use until 1978.
02 Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı
Haseki Hamamı
Turkey · 1.2 km from Istanbul41.007° N 28.979° E
Gryffindor This panoramic image was created with Autostitch (stitched images may differ from reality) . · Public domain Few buildings in Istanbul have better neighbours than the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı. It stands in the open ground between the Hagia Sophia and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, on a site where the city's baths have a very long pedigree: this was the location of the Baths of Zeuxippus, the great public baths of Roman and Byzantine Constantinople. In 1556 Hürrem Sultan — known in Europe as Roxelana, the powerful consort of Süleyman the Magnificent — commissioned a new bath here from the court architect Mimar Sinan, as a charitable foundation to serve the congregation of the Hagia Sophia, which had been a mosque for a century.
Did you know? During its long years without bathers the building was used at various times as a prison, a paper store and even a fuel depot.
03 Széchenyi thermal bath
Széchenyi gyógyfürdő
Hungary · 1.8 km from Budapest47.518° N 19.082° E
Marc Ryckaert ( MJJR ) · CC BY 3.0 Budapest is a city of thermal water, and bathing here is a civic habit rather than a luxury. Its largest bath complex stands in City Park on the Pest side: a palace of domes and colonnades where, in the outdoor pools, steam rises off the water on winter mornings and regulars sit in the water over games of chess. Locals call it simply "Szecska".
Did you know? At the top of the main dome a mosaic shows the sun god Helios driving his four-horse chariot, ringed by the signs of the zodiac.
04 Sultan Amir Ahmad Hammam
Iran · 12.9 km from Kashan33.975° N 51.441° E
Amir Pashaei · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Sultan Amir Ahmad Bathhouse, also called the Qasemi Bathhouse, is one of the loveliest surviving public baths in Iran, and its roof is one of the most photographed rooftops in the country. The bath was first built in the sixteenth century under the Safavids, damaged by the earthquake that struck Kashan in 1778, and rebuilt in the Qajar period that followed, so that the building we see is a Safavid bath in its plan and a Qajar one in much of its finish. It takes its name from the shrine of Imamzadeh Sultan Amir Ahmad, which stands close by.
Did you know? Restorers in the 1990s stripped away 17 layers of later plaster to reach the original finish beneath.
05 Çemberlitaş Hamamı
Turkey · 1 km from Istanbul41.009° N 28.972° E
Azerifactory · CC BY-SA 4.0 Çemberlitaş Hamamı has been heating water and steam on the same corner of old Istanbul since 1584. It was founded by Nurbanu Sultan, the widow of Selim II and mother of Murad III, as a charitable endowment: the bath's takings went to support the great mosque complex she had built across the Bosphorus in Üsküdar, the Atik Valide. The design is traditionally credited to Mimar Sinan, the architect of the Süleymaniye, though it was most likely carried out by the team of builders working under him rather than by the master himself. It stands on the Divanyolu, the ceremonial avenue of the Ottoman capital, directly opposite the Column of Constantine, a relic of the Roman city known in Turkish as Çemberlitaş, which gives the neighbourhood and the bath their name.
Did you know? In May 1902, under Sultan Abdülhamid II, some 30,000 censored books were burned in the bath, among them works by Montesquieu, Rousseau and Namık Kemal.
06 Dōgo Onsen Honkan
Japan · 2 km from Matsuyama33.852° N 132.786° E
Arnaud Malon · CC BY 2.0 Dōgo Onsen is counted among the oldest hot springs in Japan, with a history reaching back more than a thousand years, and the Honkan — the main public bathhouse — is its unmistakable centrepiece. The present building went up in 1894, at the initiative of Isaniwa Yukiya, as a grand communal bath for the people of Matsuyama. In December 1994, a century later, it became the first public bathhouse in Japan to be designated a national Important Cultural Property.
Did you know? The Yūshinden is the only bath in Japan built exclusively for the imperial family; its tub is cut from Aji stone, a prized granite.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful public bath in the world?
- On our list, Müllersches Volksbad (Germany) ranks first, followed by Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı (Turkey) and Széchenyi thermal bath (Hungary).
- What is a hammam?
- A hammam is a steam bath of the Islamic world, inherited from Roman baths. Bathers move from a cooler entrance hall into heated rooms, often lying on a warm marble platform beneath a dome lit by small skylights.
- Who designed the famous hammams of Istanbul?
- Many were designed by Mimar Sinan, chief architect of the Ottoman Empire in the 16th century, including the Haseki Hürrem Sultan Hamamı and the Çemberlitaş Hamamı.
- Which country has the most beautiful public baths?
- In our collection, the most come from Turkey (2), Germany (1) and Hungary (1).
- How many public baths are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 6 public baths in 5 countries. Turkey has the most, with 2.