Belle Époque Spas
Between 1870 and 1914 Europe took its holidays by prescription, and the spa towns kept the colonnades to prove it. This collection restores the season of parasols, casinos and morning waters.
Between about 1870 and 1914 a considerable part of Europe took its holidays by prescription. A doctor named the water, the town and the duration; the patient went for three weeks, drank at fixed hours, walked the colonnade between glasses and returned with a certificate. The cure was a medical instruction that happened to require a season abroad, which suited everybody.
The architecture followed the prescription exactly. A pump room to drink in, a colonnade to walk in when it rained, a park because the doctors ordered exercise, a theatre and a casino because three weeks is a long time, and a railway station large enough for the trunks. Almost every town in this collection has the same five buildings in the same relationship, and where one is missing something went wrong with the town.
What ended it was not medicine but the war, and then the medicine. Antibiotics removed tuberculosis from the argument, the empires that supplied the clientele dissolved, and the towns were left with theatres too big for them. Some found a second life — Davos took the World Economic Forum, Montreux took jazz, Vichy took an unwanted political meaning. Others simply stopped, which is why a spa town out of season is one of the most particular atmospheres in Europe.
Go in winter if you want to understand them. The water is the same temperature it always was.