On the Friday I was walking around Karlovy Vary, marvelling at the mineral springs, which unlike at its sibling towns on the West Bohemian Spa Triangle, are hot here. Marvelling and also wondering Where’s the pool fed by this water? In Iceland, if so much as a dribble of hot water springs out of the ground, they build a swimming pool there or something ten times the price aimed at the tourists. Either way, people would be bathing in this water, not drinking it.
But it turns out Karlovy Vary does have that pool and it’s on the roof of the Hotel Thermal. Well, that’s what I thought. All my research had said again and again, go to the pool at the Hotel Thermal but actually, the pool doesn’t really belong to the hotel. The hotel is just the downstairs entrance from the town. You can drive up to the top entrance which is where the car park is, as well as the views over Karlovy Vary but for those of us who’ve turned up without cars, you enter through the Hotel Thermal. The pool is actually the flagship Saunia Thermal Resort. Saunia has sauna complexes in seven towns across Czechia as well as over the border in Bratislava but the others seem to be just sauna worlds – four to eight different styles of sauna paired with cold plunge pools, ice wells and cold showers. Saunia Thermal Resort is a lot more than that.
So, you go up the concrete ramp and into the Hotel Thermal – which, I have to say, is very dimly lit and unwelcoming at before nine o’clock on a Saturday morning. Up the stairs, across the landing and to the glass passageway with a lift at the end of it. Actually, this isn’t a lift, it’s a mini funicular railway sliding you up a steep slope inside a concrete tunnel up to the pool complex perched on the side of the cliff above Karlovy Vary. At 9am, it’s quiet here – you’ll still wait longer than you expected for the lift but when I left in the early afternoon, the queue downstairs for the lift stretched all the way out of the glass passageway and there were queues at reception. You can buy your tickets at the desk but I preferred to be certain and bought mine online in advance. Then you get given a towel and a wristband and you’re through into the changing rooms.
As seems to be a bit of a habit in public pools in Czechia, they’re unisex. Change in your own private cubicle and then go and pick a locker. Your wristband is your locker key and your credit card for the cafe downstairs as well as for if you overstay. Pay everything off when you leave and then you can use it to open the turnstile and leave. I’d spared myself the stress of keeping an eye on the time by getting an all day ticket, which was 899 CZK, or around £32. A word of warning: you can’t buy online tickets on the day and they scared me by telling me that the ticket would be delivered to me “in the next 24 hours”. When I wanted to use it in twelve hours’ time, that’s a concern but it appeared in my email in about two minutes.
The main attraction is the outdoor pool. Two outdoor pools, actually. The most obvious one is the swimming pool, which is a big blue swimming pool with water somewhere between 30° and 32°C – see the electronic noticeboard on the wall of the building for details. That pool is fun – you can swim out from inside or you can go through the cafe and outside via the steps if, for example, you’re clutching a towel that you can’t want to drag through the water. There are swimming lanes in the pool marked by full height steel walls at top and bottom and lane marking ropes marking not only the lanes but the side of the swimming area and then the entire perimeter is just space to relax, with bubble benches and jets and all sorts. I love an outdoor pool and 30-32° is pretty warm for an outdoor pool so I love it even more.
The second pool is the mineral pool and it’s the small pool with the slightly more green-tinted water at the far end of the swimming pool. This is 38°C and is fed by the Vřídel spring, the same one that’s erupting a 12m geyser down in the town, the same one that had me pondering the day before. This pool is rich in minerals, so it feels ever so slightly silky and it’s warm and the pool is full of places to sit and enjoy it. I preferred the reclining benches at each end but there are also benches for sitting on under the water. The water’s slightly green-tinted but it’s still thoroughly translucent and yet it’s still surprisingly easy to not see the benches and crash into them. There are signs up on the wall, entirely in Czech but entirely comprehendible for those of us who don’t speak Czech instructing that you should stay no longer than twenty minutes in there.
Twenty minutes? I’m no amateur! I’ve stayed in the Blue Lagoon for an entire day multiple times. Or if it’s for the sake of making sure all Saunia visitors get a turn, it was surprisingly quiet for a Saturday morning, especially on Easter Saturday when it felt half the population of Czechia and a quarter of the population of Germany were all enjoying the long weekend in Karlovy Vary. I stayed in there for at least two and a half hours and I only got out because I knew I was writing this blog post and I needed to find out what else was on offer at Saunia.
Well, I avoided the steam rooms. The unwritten rules of textile-free or not were too unwritten and I didn’t know how they were meant to work, although since the doors were in public areas, I guess you just go in and I’ve never been in a steam room where anyone even attempts to sit on a towel. The saunas were easier, once I’d found them. The signs are a bit misleading but they’re up the stairs above the cafe. A free sheet is available for all visitors and you scan your wristband to confirm that this is your first. They’ll give you more but you have to pay, which means scanning the wristband again and then paying it off when you depart.
As well as the eight saunas and the “4 types of cooling”, there are Aufguss ceremonies here, which means that at certain times, some of the saunas are scented or an Aufguss master waves a towel around. Those saunas appeared to be the downstairs ones so I fled upstairs where it was marginally quieter. Leave your swimwear and towel here rather than in the overcrowded cubbies and pegs downstairs – for this is a textile-free area. Swimsuit off and cover up with your sheet. Please cover up with your sheet. I saw things in the sauna area that I thought the sheets would protect my eyes from.
I’ve slightly lost track of which saunas I tried. The tropical one smelled of tropical fruit, which was nice. The salt one was lighter and airier and quite a bit cooler. The Finnish one was a lot hotter. I don’t think I found the whisk one or the sauna “with steam impact”. The sauna world is small and dark and enclosed and I appreciate that heating entire rooms to 40 to 90° is expensive but they were crowded and the corridors between them were worse, which wasn’t helped by the literal piles of flipflops dumped outside every door making it harder to get in and out. If I ever thought my tolerance for saunas was increasing, the Finnish sauna reminded me sharply that it’s not. On the other hand, I can sit for quite a while in a less scorching sauna now.
I didn’t love the sauna area. Too hot, too busy, too dark and the tiled stairs felt like a deathtrap, especially when everyone’s wearing their sheet as a toga. I trod on mine more than once. I didn’t find the cooling pool but I found the ice bucket and the showers and was glad to cool off. Not nearly as glad as I was to put my swimsuit back on, dump my towel in a laundry basket and get back out to the pools.
Oh, and if you want it, there’s the cafe so you can linger in the pools literally all day. But my favourite thing, other than that glorious mineral pool, was the view over Karlovy Vary. I hadn’t realised exactly where the pool was, even as I walked past it on the Friday and looked at the craggy cliff wall behind the Hotel Thermal. Completely oblivious to the pool perched on top of that wall.
I Am A Polar Bear 