I Am A Polar Bear

When I went to Baden-Baden, I was expecting the famous spa town to be a bit like Budapest, in that it would have a different spa on every street corner and I’d need to spend at least three or four days to work through a good selection, so I was quite disappointed to find there were only two. I spend Friday afternoon & evening in Caracalla, which is the bigger and more extensive. I’d actually have liked to go to Friedrichsbad on Friday because they recommend around three hours there and then I could have spent the entire day Saturday in Caracalla. But there’s one huge difference between the two. Friedrichsbad is (mostly) “textile-free”.

Friedrichsbad is housed in a big stone Renaissance-style building and opened in 1877. It’s what Germany calls a Roman-Irish bath because it’s inspired by Roman baths which was something recommended by Irish Dr Richard Barter. It’s got hot air rooms and pools of various temperatures, Roman-style but German-style, they don’t like swimwear. I can cope with that, kind of, but I prefer not to have to and fortunately, now I don’t have to! From 1877 until July 2024, it was entirely swimwear-free but now they have swimwear days on Wednesdays and Saturdays! So obviously, since I had a Friday afternoon and a whole Saturday in Baden-Baden, Friedrichsbad had to be on the Saturday. If my trip had worked out differently, I’d have put up with textile-free-ness but it was so much more comfortable to not be publicly naked.

I arrived around 10am, which was early enough for Friedrichsbad to be nice and quiet. You go into a big spectacular hall, pay at the desk on the left and are sent up the grand staircase. I was told to up the stairs and to the right which was fine until the stairs doubled back on themselves. Am I going to the right as seen from the bottom of the stairs or from the top? Well, I went for the right as seen from the bottom because when I got to the top of the stairs on the right, I could see the entrance to the changing rooms, accessed as always via my electronic wristband. This feels much more decadent than Caracalla – instead of colourful slightly plasticky doors on two-way changing rooms and lockers, everything is dark wood and the changing rooms are so much bigger. I had my choice of lockers and after going in the direction of the showers, I realised I don’t need to take my own towel in with me. In fact, I don’t really need to take the towel with me at all. Everything except swimwear is provided.

I jumped in the showers before starting, only to discover that the first step is a thermal shower. The thermal showers have big brass handles like on submarine hatches but the showers you use to actually get clean are more modern. There’s an order to what you do here at Friedrichsbad and fortunately, everything is numbered so you can be sure you’re doing it correctly. I missed the sandals here because I brought my own but if you don’t have pool shoes, you can pick up a pair in this room – dip them in the disinfectant and then the rinsing water first.

Off the side of the thermal shower room is the warm air room, where you lie on a wooden bench in a pleasant 54° room, staring at the 19th century tiled majolica murals, which are paintings mostly of birds and very pretty when you’re used to more modern and sleek spa settings. I wished I could take my GoPro in but even though everyone is fully dressed, you’re still not allowed cameras or phones in the baths so I tried to memorise them, which is no use for a blog.

You lie on a big sheet on these wooden benches. I learned afterwards that a neatly folded towel is waiting for you in some of the lockers but mine didn’t have one so I took one from the rack right outside the warm air room. This was as close to the Roman baths experience I’d wanted at Bath as I’m ever likely to experience. This warm air room is probably the equivalent of the tepidarium – a room heated by an underfloor hypocaust system with a “pleasant feeling of constant radiant heat”. There’s a recommended time to stay in each place as well as a given order but at this point, I hadn’t spotted that so I just stayed there for as long as I felt like it. I watched other people in the room and they went off into a second room off the side of the warm air room and then came back out and back into the shower room a few minutes later. So, eventually, curious, I got up and went into the second room.

This is the equivalent of the caldarium, I think – it’s the hot air room at 68° which is so much hotter and stickier and uncomfortable than the warm air room. I could see why no one stayed in there long and even the baths clearly expected this because there were six or eight benches in the warm room and only two or three in the hot room. Oh, it was hot!

Back out into the warm air room, back into the shower room and off to the left to the steam room. You don’t take your sheet in here, so after dithering a bit about what to do with it, I hung it up on a peg and went in. Of course, in Germany you don’t just sit in the steam room. There are little plastic mats stored in racks in boxes of disinfectant which you rinse in the clean water and then sit on them on the raised platform in the middle of the room. I’m not sure what temperature this is, either 45° or 48°, but it’s not clear from the map for reasons I’ll get to. Anyway, I sat in the hot steamy air, staring at the mineral deposits left by 150 years of hot mineral water pouring down the side of the room. Then I decided it was time for step 9.

Step 9, through another door, is the first pool, a thermal bath at 36° in a marble room. It’s a little cooler than I’d like and it’s also the hottest pool in the place. This was the first time I got a glimpse of the ceiling. Each of these pools has a domed ceiling over it and each of them has a stained glass panel above it. For a massive stone Renaissance palace, the very modern glass was a surprise – a lot of straight lines, reds and blues and greens and long thin rectangles crossing over at weird angles. Most unexpected.

From step 9, I could see step 10, a bubble bath through a narrow passageway behind the thermal pool. The bubble bath is very shallow, with what I suspect is a false floor in it so that you can sit, rather than stand, in the warm bubbly water. This is down another two degrees to 34° and is smaller still. At this point it occurred to me that this is Baden-Baden’s busiest and most popular bath. Well, Saturday morning is very different to Friday night but if this was busy, where were all the people supposed to go? Were we just lucky in that everyone was spread out between the various rooms and pools and hadn’t yet foregathered together in pool 10?

Next was the culmination of all this. Through a door down the side of pool 9 was the main pool, the big circular one under the spectacular 19th century dome. In I went and realised I’d miscounted somewhere, because pool 10 was another bubble bath but a much bigger one off to the side of pool 11.

This was interesting. Instead of being a small chamber like the previous bubbling pool, this one had a relatively high ceiling and the walls were decorated with various pieces of gold-themed art. I appreciated that for a while and then my eyes wandered higher until they were stopped – with an actual out-loud gasp – by the figure looming over the whole thing. A large frowning male face surrounded by snakes, or maybe a huge mass of curly hair. Exactly the same Gorgon head as looked over the Roman bath at Bath!

At Bath, no one really knew who this figure was or what it represented. Is it a Gorgon? Why is it male? What has a Gorgon got to do with baths or Minerva or Sulis? But here it was again! I immediately planned to go and do the tour of Baden-Baden’s Roman baths, only to be scuppered later that day to discover that they’re closed throughout the winter. Guided tours happen only once a month and I suspect they’re not big on English self-guided tours – I’ll talk more about that in future blogs. Well, maybe the internet could tell me who that figure is. Nope! I mean, maybe the German-speaking internet has more information but I’ve not been able to dig it out. But it was enough to know that this male Gorgon-like figure is apparently a thing in Roman baths.

At last it was time to go in the thermal exercise bath, which is what they call the big central pool. As befits an exercise bath, it’s the coolest of the lot, at just 28°, which is a fine temperature for a lane pool outside in Iceland in December but feels a bit chilly inside a spa. I had a very quick dip and then I went through the door on the opposite side of the pool, only to find myself back in bath 9.

I stopped. I stared around. How had I got turned around like this? I stared at the ceiling. And then I realised the little passageway in the corner leading to the bubble was missing. I wasn’t in pool 9, even though the sign on the side of the pool said I was. I went back out into the steam room. The door out to the thermal showers was on the wrong side of the room but there was a third door on the opposite side, leading to a second steam room. I was completely confused. Why was there a second, mirrored spa hiding here?

I went back to the big central bubble pool to make sense of it. Well, that was how they packed in so many more people than it looked like. This is a double spa and half the visitors are in the other half. That’s why I’d been told to go to the right – other people would be sent to the left to make sure the two halves were filled equally and didn’t end up overcrowding one. It seemed like an odd arrangement, especially as it hadn’t appeared in the map I’d glanced at for all of two seconds while getting changed. It was only much later that it occurred to me that back in the days before mass tourism, it would have been one half for ladies and one half for men, coming together only in the central exercise pool.

That’s why I couldn’t figure out the steam bath temperature, even now I’m looking at that map. The map only shows one half of the spa and it’s the half I wasn’t in. That little chamber is an extra bubble bath in one half and an extra steam room in the other half, although they’ve moved the door so it connects to its twin on each side. I hadn’t miscounted the baths – there’s a small pool 10 in one half and then a large pool 10 in the centre.

Now that I was making sense of the place, I went back to the central cool bath and swam lazily from one side to another. Being a circular pool, and not that big, it’s not ideal for swimming lengths but for stirring your blood and your muscles after a couple of hours moving languidly from hot air room to warm pool to warm pool, I guess it’s exactly what you need; some very gentle exercise.

What I should have done next was go all the way back to the beginning for another thermal shower before a cold dip. What I actually did next was a circuit of the two warmer pools. I was staring at the ceiling in the warmest bath, bath 9, when a woman came through from the other side and I tried not to laugh out loud as she did exactly the same “What’s going on? I’ve just been here!” as I did, except in reverse.

When you’re finished, you’re given a huge towel from a heated cupboard. It’s a massive thing. I have blankets that aren’t even as big as this towel. You’re supposed to dry off here rather than drip into the changing rooms, so I did. Much less confusing if you’re textile-free, I guess – dry and then wander off wrapped in your towel. I’m not keen on wrapping a towel around a soaking wet swimsuit – it doesn’t do either any good. Somehow at this stage, I managed to miss the end – instead of turning right and going back to the changing rooms, you’re supposed to turn left and get slathered in some kind of cream and then you relax in your giant heated towel in the relaxation room. Then you can go and sit in the reading room until you’re ready to get changed and depart. But I missed all this. I went straight from heated towel to getting dressed. That’s fine. I’m sure it’s very pleasant but I was here for the hot water and at least I’d done that bit.

I really liked Friedrichsbad. I wasn’t expecting to – the fact that it’s old makes it feel kind of staid; the fact that it has this prescribed routine that you follow in order; the lack of a proper really warm pool. I thought Caracalla would be much more fun and much more varied in its offering. But in fact, it was Friedrichsbad I liked. Would I make a special journey to Baden-Baden to do it again? I might. Not an outright yes but not an outright no either. Somehow, I liked the order and the calm and the fact that you don’t mostly wonder excitedly “Which thing shall I do next?”. I liked that this is as close to a proper Roman bath experience as I’m ever likely to get. I liked that it wasn’t full of shrieking kids or unreservable loungers with towels draped over them nonetheless. It had far more of a spa atmosphere and far less of a waterpark one. And of course, I adored that giant hot towel.

I’d also highly recommend going on a swimwear day – Wednesday or Saturday. I’m not sure I would have enjoyed it in the same way if I’d been textile-free, nor if all the people around me had been the same. It’s a really new innovation so every blog I read avidly as I ate my lunch back in my hotel room afterwards detailed the public nudity but since July 2024, you can now go non-naked if you go on the right day, so keep that in mind if it makes a difference to your plans.