Lázně Slatinice

Lázně Slatinice sit halfway between Olomouc and Prostějov at the foot of the Velký Kosíř nature park, and the spa claims to be the oldest curative bath in Moravia. Its springs were named as medicinal in print in 1580 by the Moravian physician Tomáš Jordán of Klausenburk; by 1714 the bath had seven rooms; a building begun in 1731 directly over the spring was abandoned because the ground turned out to be near-marsh, and the spa house that still stands was put up on the present site in 1733. Its original architecture survives around today's dining room, restaurant and balneo department. The bath was requisitioned as a military hospital in the First World War, nationalised in 1947, run as Léčebna Slatinice under the Teplice nad Bečvou state spas from 1964 to 1993, and turned into a joint-stock company in 1996; rebuilding has been continuous since the current owners bought it in 2000.

The natural source is registered as BJ 12: a medium-mineralised, alkaline, clear water with raised sulphide sulphur, of HCO3-Cl-Ca-Na-Mg type, which the spa itself describes as a cold mineral water with a hydrogen-sulphide smell rather than a thermal one. It is drawn from the Jan Adam z Lichtenštejna borehole, 372 m deep with a deep fault at 180 m that lets two deposits be tapped at once; that well entered service in 2011 and replaced the older St Wenceslas spring. Four further named springs stand around the village, from Svatý Jiří at 92 m and about 17 °C down to Zdeněk at 13 m in the mill, where a limnigraph picked up the 2004 Asian earthquake eight minutes after it struck. The indication list is wide for a sulphur bath: musculoskeletal, skin, nervous, oncological and circulatory disease, with the source's suitability set out in a 2008 Czech health ministry bulletin.

Bathing is arranged as treatment rather than as a water park. The Balnea house, built in 2004 and rebuilt and extended in 2014, holds a 12.5 m covered pool with a whirlpool at 28 °C, open to residents and to the public, with group exercise and aqua Nordic walking sessions run in it on medical referral. A second pool, the rehabilitation mineral pool in the Morava house, runs at 32 °C and is used only for prescribed procedures. Around them runs a long list of sulphur baths — plain, pearl, additive, scented, hemp, Dead Sea salt and Kneipp salt — along with massages, a fitness room and the sauna suite at the Majorka guest house, hired in two-hour slots. Bathers are told to take off jewellery first, because the sulphur water discolours precious metals.