Friedrichsbad

Interesting facts

Directly below the bath’s terrace lie remains of a Roman soldiers’ bath, probably built in the 70s AD, with underfloor and wall heating.

The Roman town on this site was called Aquae, later Aquae Aureliae, after the hot springs that still feed the bath.

The water emerging from the springs fell as rain some 12,000 to 17,000 years ago before percolating down to great depth.

Every day the springs bring up around 2,400 kilograms of dissolved minerals with their 800,000 litres of water.

The bathing ritual runs through 17 stations, from hot-air rooms and a soap-brush massage to the domed pool and a cold plunge, over about three hours.

The Irish half of the ritual derives from the hot-air bath that Dr Richard Barter introduced in Blarney, Ireland, in 1856.

In keeping with its nineteenth-century ritual, bathing in the Friedrichsbad is traditionally done without swimwear.

Mark Twain came to Baden-Baden in 1878, the year after the bath opened, and wrote about the town’s waters in A Tramp Abroad.

The building covers a footprint of about 62.5 by 50 metres, stepped up the hillside in three blocks.

Why it is worth it

Baden-Baden has been a bathing town since the Romans, and the Friedrichsbad is where that long history is most visible. When gambling was about to be banned across Germany from 1872, the town needed a new draw for its guests. The Grand Duke Friedrich I sent the district building inspector Karl Dernfeld and the spa physician Carl Frech on a tour of Europe's great baths; Dernfeld's direct models were the Raitzenbad in Budapest and the Graf-Eberhardsbad in Wildbad, and he also had the imperial baths of Rome in mind. Construction began in 1869 on the slope of the Florentinerberg, where the diggers came upon the remains of Roman baths, and the building opened on 15 December 1877.

It is a palace of water in Neo-Renaissance dress, built of red and white sandstone and stepped in three blocks up the steep hillside. The main façade on Römerplatz follows the High Renaissance palazzo: plain below, richly worked above, with a triumphal-arch centrepiece, portrait medallions and niches of rulers and scholars linked to bathing. Two gold inscriptions quote Goethe's Faust in praise of water and fire. Inside, the plan is strictly symmetrical. At its heart is a round pool under a dome 17.5 metres high, carried on blind arches and Corinthian columns, modelled on the caldarium of the Baths of Caracalla.

The water rises from twelve springs on the Florentinerberg, from depths of 1,200 to 1,800 metres, at 56 to almost 69 °C, about 800,000 litres a day. The bath combines the Roman sequence of warm and hot rooms with the Irish hot-air bath, an idea that reached Europe in the mid-19th century. Its original painted interiors were whitewashed in 1950 and only partly restored in 1980–81. The Roman bath ruins found during construction are shown in an exhibition space in the building.

Mark Twain is credited with the line that after ten minutes here you forget time and after twenty the world; whoever said it, the dim, echoing rotunda earns it.

Getting there

The Friedrichsbad stands in the old town of Baden-Baden, on Römerplatz, about 0.3 km from the centre. Karlsruhe/Baden-Baden Airport (FKB) is about 12 km away.

Friedrichsbad

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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