Eleven historic spa towns across Europe were inscribed as a single transnational UNESCO world heritage site in 2021, a designation that recognised what the listing called an exceptional testimony to the European spa phenomenon, at its peak between roughly 1700 and the 1930s. The Guardian’s travel desk has selected ten of those destinations — and their surrounding regions — as candidates for an autumn break built around mineral springs, thermal pools and treatments that predate modern wellness tourism.
UNESCO’s roll includes Bath in England, the Belgian town of Spa, and the west Bohemian spa triangle of Karlovy Vary, Františkovy Lázně and Mariánské Lázně.
Mariánské Lázně, Czechia
Karlovy Vary draws the largest crowds and sits within day-trip distance of Prague, but the Guardian rates Mariánské Lázně as the more attractive of the Bohemian trio. Three healing traditions operate side by side here: mineral springs, carbon dioxide springs locally called Maria’s Gas, and therapeutic peloids made from mud and clay. Czech citizens are still prescribed multi-week spa stays to recover from surgery, serious illness or long-term conditions, though any visitor can book in.
The Nové Lázně hotel, a canary-yellow neo-renaissance building completed in 1896 and facing the central park, offers doubles from €234 B&B with spa access included. Its bathhouse retains marble columns and ornate treatment cabins, among them one constructed for King Edward VII, a guest on nine occasions. Visitors join locals in drinking the waters from purpose-made porcelain cups along the colonnades, traditionally accompanied by a spa wafer — a large, thin, crisp confection filled with hazelnut, chocolate or similar sweet fillings.
Bad Kissingen, Germany
Germany counts roughly 350 designated spa towns, three of which appear on the UNESCO list: Baden-Baden, favoured by celebrities; the quieter riverside Bad Ems; and Bad Kissingen in Bavaria, which the Guardian considers the most architecturally interesting of the three. Much of its central spa district was rebuilt in the early 20th century by the German architect Max Littmann, including a grand fountain hall topped with a stained-glass roof where Brunnenfrauen — fountain women — serve different mineral waters through bronze pipes. The enormous basilica-style Wandelhalle hosts performances by the town’s spa philharmonic orchestra several times daily.
Music has long formed part of the spa experience, and the Staatsbad Philharmonie Kissingen holds a world record for the greatest number of concerts staged in a single year, at 727. The art nouveau Regentenbau contains one of Europe’s finest concert halls.
Today’s main public bathhouse is the modern KissSalis Therme on the southern edge of town, priced from €19 for two hours, with indoor and outdoor thermal pools, mud treatments and clothing-free saunas. More traditionally, the Grand Hotel Kaiserhof Victoria stands beside the Wandelhalle on the Kurgarten, with doubles from €209 B&B including spa access. Water for its spa is drawn directly from the brine spring, and the inhalation room houses a wooden graduation tower coated in knobbly salt deposits that reproduces the therapeutic effect of mineral-rich sea air.
Bad Wildbad, Germany
Set deep in the northern Black Forest, Bad Wildbad offers nature immersion beyond its thermal springs. Sommerberg — summer mountain — rises above the town, reached by a funicular railway that also serves as the trailhead for hiking and cycling routes. The accessible Treetop Walk, at €12.50, spirals above dense pines to an observation tower 40 metres high, with a tunnel slide running back down through the middle, while the Wildline suspension bridge, €9.50, stretches a 380-metre walkway across the Enz valley.
Two thermal baths serve the town. The modern Vital Therme prescribes movement therapy and spa treatments for guests with joint and back problems, at €14 for three hours. The historic Palais Thermal surrounds its pools with marble pillars, statues of Venus and Moorish tiles, at €21 for three hours. Mokni’s Palais Hotel connects directly to the Palais Thermal building, allowing guests to walk across in bathrobes; doubles start at €183 B&B with spa access included.
Bagnoles de l’Orne, France
Local legend holds that the medieval lord Seigneur Hugues de Tessé released his faithful warhorse Rapide into Normandy’s Andaines forest to live out its final years in peace. The animal returned to him stronger and full of life and then led its master to the warm, sulphurous spring at Bagnoles. A spa resort later grew up on the spot so that the Parisian bourgeoisie could share in the same fountain of youth, with belle époque villas arranged around a lake in the middle of the forest. The site sits less than an hour and a half from the ferry port at Caen.
That belle époque quarter was the vision of the local politician Albert Christophle, whose former hunting lodge on the village edge now operates as the five-bedroom Château du Gué aux Biches, with doubles from €195 B&B. This summer its Danish owners, Klaus Bentin and Soren Rasmussen, added a restaurant in the old kitchen serving smørrebrød, or open sandwiches. The hotel partners with the nearby B’O Resort spa, so either owner will arrange treatments, and bicycles are available for the couple of kilometres to a clay body wrap or hydromassage. Hiking, cycling and trail-running routes cross the surrounding forest, which in autumn yields more than 1,700 varieties of mushroom for foraging.
Bad Gastein, Austria
This genteel town in the Hohe Tauern Alps was built on water, with a roaring waterfall running straight through its centre. The reputation of its radon-rich thermal springs prompted the construction of grand hotels in the 19th century for the emperors, aristocrats, writers and thinkers — Sigmund Freud among them — who came seeking cures. The fashion for taking the waters faded, but a clutch of new hotels has driven a revival. The Cōmodo, refashioned from a 1960s sanatorium, offers doubles from €188 B&B, with bedrooms and a thermal-water indoor pool looking out over the valley and mountains.
Several public fountains still dispense water straight from the source, warm and slightly salty with a metallic taste, though the Guardian suggests soaking instead at the brutalist Felsentherme public bath complex, which charges €40 for a day pass. Also warming, if less beneficial, is a bowl of Kaspressknödelsuppe — beef broth with cheese-infused dumplings — at the Schafflinger Alm cabin, with soups from €4.50 and mains from €17, after a forest hike or a session on the Schlossalm-Angertal-Stubnerkogel ski area, where the season opens in late November.
Piešťany, Slovakia
Just before the Colonnade Bridge leads onto Piešťany’s Spa Island, a statue of a man breaking his crutch stands as a symbol of the thermal waters and sulphurous mud harnessed on this enclave in the Váh River. The first simple wooden bathhouses appeared on the island in 1778, but the 1912 opening of the Thermia Palace hotel and its Irma Balneotherapy House turned the site into a health resort. Further hotels and spas sit among the trees, growing more concrete and functional with distance from the bridge.
The Thermia Palace remains the most upmarket option, running a range of treatment programmes from extensive diagnostics and laboratory tests to mud packs and pools, with doubles from €210 half-board including spa access. The blue-black mud is applied across the body at a toasty 45C and left for about ten minutes before being hosed off. Outside, the spa park offers lily ponds, fountains and free-roaming peacocks. In town, Elektrárňa Piešťany, a former power station converted into a cultural centre, hosts film festivals and rock concerts, while the strikingly brutalist House of Arts stages chamber orchestras and tango trios.
Rogaška Slatina, Slovenia
This eastern Slovenian town is known for Donat Mg, among the world’s most magnesium-rich mineral waters and traditionally drunk for digestive benefits. The company now sells millions of bottles annually, but at the source visitors can sip it free from the fountains in the Pivnica Drinking Hall, though its salty, fizzy, metallic flavour is an acquired taste.
Like comparable towns, Rogaška attracted Europe’s great and good in the 19th century, and its architecture reflects that era. A short walk from the drinking hall through immaculately clipped gardens leads to the butter-yellow Grand Hotel Rogaška, with doubles from €198 half-board including spa access. Bedrooms are traditional, while the spa offers carbon dioxide baths, mineral water inhalations, reflexology and magnetotherapy. Fittingly for a town famed for its drinking water, Rogaška is also known for glassware, and visitors can tour the Rogaška crystal factory for €12 to watch glass-blowing before buying glasses for their Donat Mg from the on-site shop. The surrounding wooded hills suit autumn walks.
Salsomaggiore Terme, Italy
In Emilia-Romagna’s food valley, not far from Parma, this small spa town offers a counterweight to the region’s culinary indulgence. Last year the Italian thermal brand QC Spa of Wonders reopened the art deco Terme Berzieri, where gilded interiors of frescoes, mosaics, majolica and stucco are as much an attraction as the salty spring waters rich in iodine and bromide; five-hour spa sessions start at €62. Alongside the usual thermal facilities are a sauna cinema and an infinity rooftop pool, while treatments in wooden barrels nod to local winemaking.
Those wines can be sampled at the Cantina Il Poggio vineyard in the hills outside town, which produces a range of styles including the local sparkling Malvasia di Candia Aromatica, with tastings from €30. Further tastings are available at a parmigiano reggiano producer such as Caseificio Ugolotti, where a tour and tasting costs €23, before ham is bought at Parma’s La Prosciutteria. A roast pork sandwich at the celebrated panini spot Pepèn precedes sightseeing at the Pilotta Palace complex, home to the Galleria Nazionale, the Palatine Library and the Farnese theatre, while the opulent Teatro Regio hosts the annual Verdi festival in October. The organic agriturismo Case Zucchi, about a ten-minute drive from Salsomaggiore, provides a food-focused base with bedrooms named after herbs and a breakfast table piled with fresh bread, eggs, ham, cheese and fruit; doubles from £104 B&B.
Monchique, Portugal
High in the Serra de Monchique, surrounded by cork oak and eucalyptus, the whitewashed hill town of Monchique offers a slower autumn escape than the Algarve coast below. Its cobbled streets are lined with craft shops, ceramic workshops and simple taverns serving chouriço with a small glass of medronho. In a wooded valley beneath the town, the spa village of Caldas de Monchique amounts to little more than a handful of 19th-century buildings around a shaded square and park, where slightly warm spring water flows from a public fountain.
Longer soaks in the alkaline waters are available at the Caldas de Monchique Villa Termal Spa Resort, with doubles from €84 and a thermal water circuit at £17 for 90 minutes. The spa runs hydro rituals including a Vichy shower, massage and bath, or circuits around the pools, sauna and Turkish baths, followed by a dip in the outdoor pool. Afterwards the 1692 restaurant, with its stained-glass windows, serves bacalhau à Monchique — salt cod stuffed with chouriço and ham. From there it is a short distance to Fóia, the Algarve’s highest mountain at 902 metres, where the summit views justify the walk, or a further 2½ miles (4km) on foot to the Barbelote waterfall, which cascades over a rocky cliff face during wetter months.
Chaves and Pedras Salgadas, Portugal
A cluster of spa towns runs through northern Portugal near the Spanish border, forming a curative route through Pedras Salgadas, Carvalhelhos, Vidago, Carlão and Chaves. In Chaves the waters rank among the hottest in Europe, emerging from the ground at 76C. The Romans built a large therapeutic bathing complex there, rediscovered by accident in 2006 when work began on an underground car park. The free Museu Termas Romanas de Chaves now lets visitors explore the pools and soaking baths, preserved intact after an earthquake in the 4th century sealed them for millennia. For contemporary bathing, the Aquae Salutem Thermal Complex, which opened in 2025, offers a circuit of outdoor pools, saunas, steam and showers at €30 for 90 minutes.
About half an hour away, the Pedras Salgadas Spa and Nature Park sits on the fringes of another small spa town. Its owners have built 18 eco-houses and treehouses on stilts among the pines at the source, with doubles from £171 B&B and spa access charged at an additional £17 per room. Guests can try forest bathing before entering the spa, redesigned by the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, for a thermal water hydro-massage, or wander between the pink spring pavilions in the park. Pedras Salgadas is also a popular naturally sparkling mineral water brand.
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