I Am A Polar Bear

Next on the Great German Spa Towns adventure is KissSalis, in Bad Kissingen. So far I’ve been to Baden-Baden’s Caracalla Therme, which sits on the spa/waterpark borderline, and Friedrichsbad, which is as close to Roman as you’re going to find in 2025. And now, after a bus, three trains and a stroll, I made it to the next Great European Spa Town and the next spa.

Unlike in Baden-Baden, Bad Kissingen’s spa isn’t in the middle of town. It was a walk of some 20-25 minutes south of the town centre, across a bridge over a major road and set next to, although you can’t see it, the out-of-town retail park. This is where I would have come if I’d been in Bad Kissingen for more than 24 hours and needed to do a big food shop. Walking down was fine; I was less keen on leaving the complex and walking down the unlit path and through the park on the other side of the road on my own in the dark. It was fine – Bad Kissingen is a small quiet place, short on tourists and big on visitors to the orthopaedic clinic, as far as I could see, and there was no problem at all with the stroll up alongside the big park at 9.30pm.

KissSalis is another of these spa/waterpark straddlers and somehow, I liked it more than Caracalla. That may have been because I opted not to bother with the sauna area. I requested four hours in my best German – Bad Kissingen isn’t big on English – because it wasn’t really worth paying for the all-day ticket by that time of day but did mean I had to keep half an eye on the clock, which is not very spa-like. These sort of places charge you for overstaying at a rate of something like a Euro for every ten minutes. It didn’t seem worth spending my four precious hours shuffling awkwardly around a textile-free sauna and I didn’t fancy being naked in public again for the second time in under 48 hours. But there’s enough in the clothed areas to keep you busy for four hours.

KissSalis, again, has a large central pool and a large glass wall overlooking the outdoor pools. The roof is held up by four white flaring pillars with coloured lights emanating from the top, which definitely had something of the fungus about them – in the shape of it, I’m not making accusations of anything unpleasant growing in the pristine spa! I definitely preferred KissSalis’s sleek white mushroomy architecture over Caracalla’s weird hybrid modern-Classical style. There’s a mushroom fountain in the pool and two nice hotpots in the side, plus a little hot-cold barefoot paddling loop, which was the first thing I tried out. Next to the door to the sauna zone, which is why it took three hours to spot it, there’s a darkened saltwater pool. Then there are the hot-cold plunge pool pair, this time surrounded by something that looked like six-foot quartz crystals and with a very interesting clear acrylic fountain where you could watch the water come up before it started spouting. These were not helpfully lit in red and blue but you could tell which was which without even looking from the happy-looking people lounging in one vs the people shrieking in ankle-deep water in the other.

Upstairs on the gallery, which you access by a long winding ramp up behind the plunge pools, there are two more small pools, called the exercise pool and the therapy pool which kind of overlook Bad Kissingen. They’re about the same temperature as the main pool downstairs, which ranges from 32-34°. I think the “Moor room” is the wellness suite for the pre-booked treatments. Next along is the steam bath and the salt inhalation room and then the last thing upstairs is my favourite – a photo station! You can’t take photos in here but you can get your souvenir photo taken and emailed to you. Unfortunately, I suspect the camera was malfunctioning because however many times I obsessively check my spam, my picture has never arrived.

Last, let’s go outside. There are two outdoor pools, one a degree or two warmer than the other, with an assortment of bubble seats, benches, jets and fountains. I spent a lot of time out here, far more than I had at Caracalla. The overhanging roof is positioned just perfectly so you can sit out in the warm water and watch the planets move overhead. In fact, during one cycle of the bubble bath, I watched Venus move right across from well clear of the roof to almost hidden by it, which was a really odd feeling, to lie there in the bubbles and literally watch the planet move.

As far as I’m concerned, there’s never a bad day for a visit to a spa but what I was learning on this trip was that a particularly good day for a spa is a day after you’ve spent several hours on several trains. I liked going into the hot plunge pool, which is a nice temperature for unwinding and I liked going outside, waiting for the lazy river, which was an incredibly powerful thing, or sitting in the bubbles. It was quieter than Caracalla and I don’t know whether that’s because Bad Kissingen is a smaller place or whether I’m comparing a Sunday evening to a Valentine’s Day’s Friday night or because of just random chance. Actually, it couldn’t have been that quiet because I’d spent at least an hour back at the hotel watching the website, which has a little bar on it telling you how full the therme is. At 4pm, it was 99% full and I left it until it was about 96% full to start the walk. So it was probably still fairly full but it didn’t feel as busy as Caracalla.

The salt pool was fun. It’s darkened in there, with little LED stars all over the walls and ceiling and I discovered, trying to doggy-paddle from the steps to the beds, that my feet float in saltwater. When I’ve been swimming in the sea, I’ve always been wearing neoprene socks and I’ve always blamed the neoprene for the fact that my buoyancy is so different from swimming barefoot in a pool. Well, it’s not the neoprene, it’s the salt and I’m an idiot for not realising that sooner! Obviously, you have to be fairly careful in the salt pool not to get water in your eyes and then you have to shower before you go back in the other pools to keep them reasonably clean and fresh. Because it’s small and dark, it does feel quite busy in there but then you slip your pool shoes back on, scurry back to the hotpots and then back to the outdoor pool and you can breathe again.

Perhaps KissSalis is just that bit further down the spa end of the spa-waterpark spectrum than Caracalla, not a lot but just enough to feel that bit more chilled, a bit more relaxed, a bit more what you want after a long day. You can’t count Friedrichsbad in the comparison table so far because it’s so very different from the other two but I liked KissSalis quite a bit more than Caracalla. Would I make a special journey to Bad Kissingen for it? Well, I’ll talk more about the town itself in a week or two but for now, let’s provisionally say I’d think about it.