Bad Ems is lovely but it’s very quiet in winter

The last stop on my adventure around the UNESCO Great German Spa Towns was Bad Ems, which is only a short train trip from Koblenz (when the line is open, which it wasn’t when I was there). Unfortunately, I was coming from Bad Kissingen and that meant five trains and a rail replacement bus, taking the best part of six hours and arriving after my hotel’s reception closed – which, admittedly, was at the ridiculously early hour of 6pm. Arriving at 8pm after a long day of travelling (because I set off two hours early and wasted some time in Würzburg en route) to a locked door and a key box in the dark made it feel like I’d arrived at midnight!

Bad Ems by night, a wide footbridge with strange pillars sticking out of it and buildings visible on the opposite side with no lights on in any of the windows.

I knew I wasn’t going to do anything that first evening – can’t guarantee I’ll even get there that first evening with five Deutsche Bahn trains involved! – which is why I was spending two nights in Bad Ems and heading home first thing on Wednesday morning after spending all of Tuesday there. I got a brief impression of a surprisingly small town gathered tightly along the banks of a river as I walked over from the station, I got a glimpse of absolute darkness from my balcony at the back of the hotel and then I went to bed.

The mountain so close to my balcony that I can't even get the balcony in it. The scrubby vegetation on it is grey-brown and so are the leafless trees.

I was on the top floor and in the morning, it turned out that “the mountain” was ten feet from the edge of the balcony, an almost sheer rock wall, which explained the darkness. But the rooftop terrace out the front had a fantastic view of Bad Ems. At that hour in the morning, it was blue-tinted view of “not icy but feels like it”. The town is set between two mountains with a river flowing down the middle and I suspect in winter, the sun doesn’t get into the depths of that narrow chasm as much as it does in other places, hence it being freezing as I walked up the town.

A view up the valley from the hotel roof early enough in the morning that everything's still quite blue. You can see the mountains on each side and therefore how little space there is on the river banks and you can also see that most of the buildings are quite grand Neo-Renaissance style that probably wouldn't look out of place in Budapest.

A few doors up was the expensive hotel, the Häcker´s Grand spa hotel which was built in 1711, although it’s been modernised and renovated since. It has its own wellness suite and if I’d had a bit longer, I would probably have taken advantage of its partnership with my own much less grand hotel to spend some time there to compare it to Emser Therme. This place is something of a palace – you can imagine all too clearly the horse-drawn carriages coming up to the door and outside, proving its spa heritage, there was a little pavilion and steps down to a spa water tap. Here is the town’s thermal spring, although it was cold. You can drink from it but you can’t take the water away in a bottle. It’s not exactly the magnificent Trinkhalle of the other towns, which is because the hotel has absorbed the building that used to be the 1912 Kurhaus, but the water at least was easy to stumble upon.

The large and ornate and off-yellow Häcker´s Grand Hotel, which occupies a surprising amount of the road.

Actually, Bad Ems was quite unlike either Baden-Baden or Bad Kissingen. It didn’t have any kind of grand bathing or drinking establishment left as a public recreation space, because it’s all now part of the privately-owned hotel. I’d observed very little English in either but here in Bad Ems there was none. Very little in the way of shops either. There was a bakery across the river with very limited opening hours, a Lidl at the other end of town, a supermarket opposite Emser Therme which only sold drinks and that was about it. If there were cafes and restaurants, I never saw them, or never saw them open, other than the evening-only German-Italian fusion one on the ground floor of my hotel. Maybe it’s just the winter but I really got the impression I’d stumbled upon a place that outsiders simply don’t know exists. A place where even other Germans don’t come as tourists, let alone people from other countries. Maybe Bad Ems really is such a small secret place – a “hidden gem” sounds nicer – or maybe I happened to be there on an obscure bank holiday when everything was closed (unlikely on a Tuesday in February but you never know).

A pair of taps coming out of a clear pillar with bubbling water in it. The tap and pillar are in a little well in the ground with red and blue spiral tiled mosaics on the floor.

If I’d thought Bad Kissingen was an odd location for a fairly substantial Therme, Bad Ems is downright weird. Where are all these people coming from? Is this why the town is so quiet, because anyone leaving their house or hotel is coming here? Does it get busier in the summer? There are two pretty big and expensive-looking spa hotels as well as the Therme and Bad Ems just doesn’t seem to have the volume of visitors require to sustain them. But what do I know? It’s one of UNESCO’s Great European Spa Towns, after all. Mid-February must be lowest of low season and I’m sure Bad Ems makes a lot more sense in July. Probably the hotels are completely sold-out, tourists wander the riverside park eating ice cream and Emser Therme is packed shoulder-to-shoulder. I’ve already talked about it but Emser Therme is very pleasant, my favourite of the three modern-style spa-waterparks I visited. The sun crept over the lower mountains at this end of town as I sat in the outside pool overlooking the river and it tried to burn my retinas out and then the cold tried to kill me as I scampered down to the river sauna – something else that probably works better in summer.

A view up the river. There's a weir in the middle and n the left is a small wooden structure over the river itself. This is the sauna.

I walked back to the hotel along the other side of the river so I could look across at Emser Therme, which is the only one whose outside areas are openly visible to the rest of town. As you cross the bridge just beyond the Therme, you get a hint of actual town – the Lidl in the converted red-brick industrial building, the small hydroelectric power plant in the middle of the river and a bigger, more residential town spreading along the side of the mountain opposite which is probably where they’re hiding all the supermarkets, bakeries, cafes and so on. Like in Bad Kissingen, the middle of this town, the tourist bit, is just for leisure – for gentle strolls by the river during any time you’re not actively partaking in the spas.

The prettiest Lidl I've ever seen, housed in a red brick ex-industrial building.

Shortly before the big hotel on my way back, I found a funicular railway. Well, I found it on my way but I wasn’t being diverted from my mission of going to a spa just for a mountain railway but on the way back, you bet I’m going up there. It’s entirely automated and you buy a ticket from a German-speaking machine rather than a human, then you get in the funicular and it takes you up the mountain in just two or three minutes. Here was something that almost surprised me. Like Bad Kissingen, Bad Ems keeps its wellness heritage going via clinics but whereas in the former they’re right in town, alongside the park, here they’re at a slightly higher altitude, where there’s a little more real estate for building large things and quite possibly out of sight of tourists here purely for pleasure.

A selfie on the edge of the trail that kind of gives a view through the leafless trees to the town below. I'm wearing sunglasses, my blue knitted hood and my red hoodie.

You can drive up as well as take the little train and it’s noticeably warmer up at the top of the mountain than down in town. Heat rises but mostly it’s that the steep mountains block the sun getting into the narrow valley below for a good chunk of the day, at least in winter. I like to see a good view and I got glimpses of Bad Ems below but the trees with their bare winter limbs blocked most of it. There are also hiking trails up here – is this a hiking destination? Is that why there doesn’t seem to be much down below? – but I opted not to hike today. It was cold, I was damp and hungry and destined to remain so, since I didn’t fancy an hour’s round walk back to the Lidl I hadn’t thought to go into. I’d assumed there would be a bakery or a city supermarket down my end of town and there wasn’t.

A building seen through the leafless trees on top of the mountain, along a brick road.

Bad Ems seemed a nice little place. I liked Bad Kissingen but if I was to go back in the summer and see them at their best, it’s Bad Ems I would pick. I’d have a proper mini wellness vacation – I’d spend every evening in Emser Therme, I’d stock up on bread and juice from Lidl, I’d spend time strolling up the mountain and sitting out on the roof terrace and not worrying about having to get five trains tomorrow. Actually, I didn’t have to get five trains the next day but I had to be on the rail replacement bus at quarter to eight for the ICE back to Frankfurt from Koblenz, so a relatively relaxed day, other than the bus being so early and the train being delayed and ending in me sitting in the freezing cold on the platform for an hour. Still, it was an hour towards my 1000 hours outdoors in 2025, so I’m not really complaining.