Freizeitbad Heveney

Freizeitbad Heveney is a leisure bath in the Heven district of Witten on the shore of the Kemnader See, between Bochum and Witten, and forms part of the Freizeitzentrum Kemnade. German Wikipedia records that it was built from 1985 to plans by the Aichele practice of Stuttgart for 16.4 million Deutschmarks and opened on 5 July 1986, making it one of the first municipal leisure baths in Germany; an outdoor pool, a slide tower and a lounging hall were added in 2004 and 2005, and by its thirtieth anniversary in July 2016 it had received more than twelve million visitors. Since January 2017 it has belonged to the Freizeitgesellschaft Metropole Ruhr, which also runs the Niederrhein Therme, the Revierpark Vonderort and the Gesundheitspark Nienhausen.

The all-weather hall is the year-round core. The operator gives its pool 700 square metres of water and fits it with swimming channels, water grottoes, a counter-current unit, floor bubblers, water cannons, wall and neck showers, massage jets and whirlpools, plus a children's paddling pool and a separate children's pool with its own slide; Wikipedia adds that the depth reaches 1.35 metres. Two giant slides run all year: the 88-metre Kemnader Blitz and the 46-metre Kemnader Donner, which the operator adds up to over 130 metres of slide and opens to children from seven. A third slide, the 100-metre outdoor slide recorded by Wikipedia, is out of service at the time of writing because its feed pump has failed and the operator is waiting for spare parts.

The outdoor bath opens for the season from May to the end of September and offers 500 square metres of water in a stainless-steel basin with bubble loungers, massage jets, water spouts, whirl loungers, a whirlpool and a current channel that children call the water carousel, set beside a large lawn. A Water Spray Park with cascade showers, a water cannon and a large frog shower, a children's paddling pool and a boat channel serve the youngest visitors, and an animation team runs afternoon games and children's parties in season.

The sauna and brine area is textile-free, separately ticketed and open all year. The operator's sauna page describes ten different saunas plus a steam bath, while the home page twice counts eleven; individual rooms are named with temperatures, including a Kelo sauna at 85 C, a mine-gallery sauna at 80 C, a steam grotto at 50 C, an earth sauna at 100 C heated by a visible fire, an infusion lounge at 90 C, a small high-heat sweat corner at 95 C, two Finnish cabins at 80 and 90 C, the Valo bio-sauna at 60 C and a steam bath at 50 C with salt applications. Cooling is by a plunge pool, showers and a crushed-ice basin, and a warmed red granite cone, the Hevener Kegel, recalls the mining history of the district. This is where the only mineralised water in the house sits: a Thermalsolebad kept at 32 C, described as suitable for gentle swimming and floating, and complemented by a brine bath and plunge pool in the sauna garden. Neither salt content, well depth nor mineralisation is published for it, and the ordinary pool water elsewhere in the bath is plain heated water.

Both the all-weather bath and the sauna and brine area open Monday to Thursday from 09:00 to 22:00, Friday and Saturday from 09:00 to 23:00 and on Sundays and public holidays from 09:00 to 21:00, with bathing ending fifteen minutes before closing. A day ticket for the leisure bath costs 11 euro for adults on weekdays and 6.50 euro for children up to seventeen; a day ticket for sauna and brine, which includes the leisure bath, costs 24 euro on weekdays, with a one-hour brine tariff at 14.90 euro and a discounted Wednesday Ladies Day sauna ticket at 18 euro.