An evening at Caracalla Therme

It’s time to start the German Spa Town adventure posts! I’m going to do the spas themselves first and then the journey and then the towns and so first up is Baden-Baden’s Caracalla Therme.

Caracalla Therme opened in 1985 although you’d think it’s under a decade old – it doesn’t look like it’s about to celebrate its 40th birthday. It’s a glass building right next to the 1877 Friedrichsbad, which makes them very handy to visit as a pair, and the main pool is housed in the circular bit sticking out of the building further up in the park. It’s named after the Roman emperor known by his nickname Caracalla (he had too many birth – Lucius Septimius Bassianus – and regnant names – Caesar Marcus Aurelius Severus Antoninus Pius Augustus – to keep track of him by any other name) who was emperor at the time the original Roman baths were built in Baden-Baden. I’d have loved to have a look at the ruins of those baths but they’re only open in the summer and, bizarrely, they only do one guided tour a month, so I missed out. Nonetheless, Caracalla is remembered in this new bath.

Approaching Caracalla Therme from the park. It's a glass building that looks more like an office than a spa, with grass lawns and a path running up to it and several tall arrow-like trees in front of it.

It can’t decide whether it wants to be modern or classical and so fuses the two together in a slightly horrifying way – that big round glass building is surrounded, outside and in, by concrete “stone” columns and there’s a small portico over the front door of the decidedly modern square entrance building. There are rings around the top of the columns which made me kind of feel like it had a touch of Art Deco on top of all that. I did like the small pool of steaming water right outside, with a Roman-style statue watching over it. Inside, there’s a shop, a place to book treatments and steps down to the underground parking garage and then a long shallow set of steps leads up to the reception and turnstiles.

Right outside the Therme is a small shallow pool of greenish water, steaming, with a statue looming over it seen on the right in this picture with the modern/Classical building behind it.

Caracalla Therme occupies that space I’ve only found so far in Germany and Poland where “a spa” dances on the edge of the border with the definition of “a waterpark”. The main pool, in that two-storey circular space with the massive glass walls leading to the outside, is a little cooler than I’d like, with jets of all heights and pressures and then two circular pools one on top of the other with more bubbles in. It’s great but it’s definitely more leisure park than zen spa experience. Behind the main pool are two plunge pools; a hot one lit with red lights and a waterfall dripping into it, and a cold one lit with blue lights. There were a lot of people sitting in the hot pool. I personally like to sit in hot water and one thing I found throughout the whole trip was that proper hot water was a bit lacking. I did like these two pools – I’d have liked more hot pools and for this one to be bigger but they’d designed it so it looked like it had been hacked out of the mountain wall behind it. I mean, it clearly hadn’t, but that’s kind of what it looked like.

There’s also a steam room, with separate nooks where you can sit, if you can see them through the dark and the thick steam. I quite liked this except I’m never sure whether I’m allowed to sit down without a towel and the steam makes my glasses steam up, which really doesn’t help with figuring out where the seats are. I appreciated the deep sinks full of cold water to stick your hands in, or splash over your body. I missed the brine inhalation room, which I assume is a slightly cooler salt sauna. For a bit of extra fun, there are loungers under UV lights if you want to really warm up, as well as general loungers. In the true German stereotype, these are all covered with towels while the occupants are in the water, despite the signs and the baskets around the place declaring that you can’t reserve the loungers.

Then there are the outside pools – two of them, accessed by steps inside and a plastic curtain. The smaller one is the warmer one and again, has massage jets as well as a large waterfall and w hirlpool in the middle. The bigger one is a little cooler but has two warmer hotpots sitting above it, a lazy river and a mushroom fountain that requires you to climb up and out of the water to enjoy. Maybe in the summer but on a February evening, no one was doing that. In the summer, you can also sunbathe out here.

The round building housing the main pool and the steam from the outdoor pools, all lit up in bright blue in the dark.

Then there’s the sauna area. As is standard in Germany and Poland, this area is “textile-free”, textiles being considered unhygienic. It’s not really in my nature to feel hugely comfortable in places like this but I wanted to try this one out and I wanted to be brave. Wearing a towel is an option and sitting on a towel in the many saunas is non-optional, so you might find you want to bring three towels with you to Caracalla, including the one you leave clean and dry for afterwards.

Now, I didn’t love the sauna area. Some of it was being modernised and wasn’t open but I think the layout was confusing and the fact that I was walking around in public textile-free didn’t help. I popped into the spectaculum, the large traditional-style sauna, which had some colourful lights radiating out from between the planks of the benches. I think it’s supposed to smell pleasant in there but I didn’t notice – I was busy trying not to mind being textile-free and trying not to look at the proud displays of things that should only be seen in Oddboxes. There’s a hotpot, presumably for warming up after the cold shower you take after the sauna but that only took about six people and I wasn’t prepared to squeeze in while textile-free. I did pop outside – you’ll want your sandals on for this bit but I didn’t think about that until my feet had been frozen by the cold decking and torn up by the anti-ice gritting crystals. I didn’t go in the fire sauna, which is the hottest and has an open log fire in it but I did go in the forest sauna. Both of these are in cute little log huts and the forest one is supposed to evoke a blacksmith’s forge. The heat comes from a metal dome and every hour on the hour, the dome rolls back and a metal spoon on a level tilts to tip cold water onto the coals underneath before tilting back to refill and then to pour again. This is apparently a marvellous ritual that shouldn’t be missed but it’s so slow and the whole thing is accompanied by the kind of mechanical whirring I’d associated with 17th century automatons.

I tried out the footbath after that, because my feet were sad, but somehow, something felt wrong about sitting with my feet in, effectively, a washing-up bowl set into a platform, with a tap on a swivel to fill the bowl to my desired depth and temperature. I like a footbath but in a spa setting, I like the bowl to be less plasticky and to fill itself and to bubble. Aqua Sana does the footbath well.

After that, I decided I didn’t need to try out any other saunas. None of this is a criticism of the sauna area, exactly, but I’m not a fan of sitting in overly-hot rooms at the best of times and textile-free is a long way from the best of times. Everyone else seemed to be enjoying it – Germans are used to this sort of thing, I think, and don’t have any inhibitions about public nudity. For me, getting dressed again, scampering down the spiral stairs and back to the outdoor pools, the hot plunge pool and the main pool, that’s more my thing.

Caracalla Therme is generally open 8am until 10pm and you can just walk in, although you might have a bit of a job finding a locker, which is operated using the wristband they give you. You can get a ticket for 2 hours, 3 hours or all day, all of them with or without the sauna area, which is an extra €5. I went along at about 5pm and opted for the all-day, reasoning that after waking up inside Heathrow terminal 3 at 4am, flying to Stuttgart and taking three trains and a bus to get here, I didn’t want to be clock-watching. I wanted to lounge in the hot water until I fell asleep.

Me, standing outside the entrance in a blue knitted hood, dark red hoodie and pink t-shirt, with that modern/Classical facade behind me.

Overall… I liked Caracalla but I didn’t love it. I wouldn’t make a special journey to Baden-Baden to visit it. That said, if I ever found myself in Baden-Baden with nothing to do of an evening, I’d go back, but I’d need to already be in town. There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, I just didn’t find it a very spa-like atmosphere and it didn’t have enough really hot water for my personal preferences. Out of ten, I’d probably give it a seven.