Baden-Baden

Why go

The waters — twelve thermal springs used since the Romans and still the reason the town exists. Belle Époque intact — colonnades, pump rooms and a casino that Marlene Dietrich called the most beautiful in the world. A serious concert hall — the Festspielhaus is the largest opera and concert house in Germany. The Black Forest at the door — walking country beginning where the promenade ends.

The character

Hot water surfaces here at sixty-eight degrees, and the Romans built baths over it in the second century. What made Baden-Baden a capital rather than a spa was the nineteenth century: after France banned gambling in 1838, the casino operators moved across the Rhine, and the combination of medically prescribed cure and legal roulette turned the town into the summer meeting place of European society. Everyone came — Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Berlioz, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, who lost his money at these tables and wrote The Gambler out of the experience.

The habit created the architecture: the Trinkhalle with its painted colonnade, the Kurhaus, the Friedrichsbad of 1877 with its sequence of seventeen bathing stations, and the Lichtentaler Allee, a two-kilometre park along the river planted specifically for walking after the waters. The town has kept all of it, and — more unusually — has kept the routine. People still take a cure here for medical reasons, the concert season is genuinely first-rank, and the tempo remains that of a place designed for people with three weeks and nothing urgent to do. Baden-Baden is not nostalgia; it is a nineteenth-century idea of health that never stopped operating.

Places of character

Friedrichsbad — the 1877 Roman-Irish bath, seventeen stations over three hours, no swimwear, no phones, no conversation. Trinkhalle — a colonnade of ninety metres with fourteen frescoes and a tap of thermal water you are meant to drink. Kurhaus and the casino — Dostoevsky's tables, in rooms modelled on Versailles. Lichtentaler Allee — the park walk beside the Oos, planted 1655 and continuously improved since. Festspielhaus — built into the old railway station, and now a house that brings the Berlin Philharmonic for residencies. Merkur funicular — up the local mountain for the view over the whole valley and the forest behind it.

The way to do it

Follow the old order, which still works: waters in the morning, culture in the afternoon, tables in the evening. Give the Friedrichsbad a full three hours and observe its rules — the silence is the point. Book concerts before you arrive. Walk the Allee at least twice, once in each direction, because the light changes what you see.

One perfect day

Thermal water at the Trinkhalle first thing, taken as prescribed, then three hours in the Friedrichsbad — steam, hot rooms, the cold plunge, and the domed rest hall afterwards, where sleeping is expected. A late light lunch, then the Lichtentaler Allee on foot to the Frieder Burda museum or the abbey at the far end. Early evening dressing for a concert at the Festspielhaus. Dinner afterwards, and at eleven the casino: not necessarily to play, but to stand in the rooms where a Russian novelist lost his advance and got a novel out of it.

Grand hotels

Brenners Park-Hotel — 1872, facing the Lichtentaler Allee, still the address for the cure taken seriously. Badischer Hof — a converted Capuchin monastery from 1807, with thermal water piped directly into its baths.

When to go

Best expression: May and June, when the park is at its best and the concert season is in full flow. Consider: deep winter, when steam rises off the pools and the spa town looks its most nineteenth-century. Avoid if possible: nothing seriously, though August brings the largest crowds and the highest prices.

The frame

Ideal stay 3 nights · Minimum 2 nights · Best arrival train from Frankfurt or Basel · Airport FKB 15 km, STR 100 km · Walkability excellent and flat along the river · Best without a car yes