Kristall Palm Beach

Kristall Palm Beach sits in Stein, immediately south-west of Nuremberg, and is really three houses under one roof. The quietest is the Kristall Therme, where guests bathe in natural medicinal water kept between 33 and 36 °C. Five basins, among them massage, bubble and Kneipp outdoor pools, are joined by two hot-water grottoes, an aroma steam grotto and an infrared amethyst lounge. The operator raises the mineral content deliberately: the 35 °C amethyst bubble pool is salted with lithium once a day and the therapy pool is dosed with magnesium and potassium. Gemstones are part of the concept rather than decoration, with the water of the rock-crystal pool led over quartz crystals and amethysts set into the amethyst pool. A water-gymnastics programme runs in the rock-crystal pool through the day, moving outdoors to the Kneipp pool in good weather.

The adventure bath next door is built around a wave pool of 32 °C thermal water under a light-filled dome planted with palms, with waves every half hour and, from October to March, a nightly laser show on the water after dusk. Swimmers have a 25-metre sports pool with five lanes, a one-metre board and a three-metre tower, open for early swimming from 8:00 from Wednesday to Saturday; outdoors there is a pool with a current channel and the Relax-Lagune at 34 °C, where a barman serves cocktails to guests standing in the water. Children get two pools with a shallow paddling zone and their own slide, a new water playground with fountains, water cannons and floor jets, a 100-square-metre bouncing cushion and a four-slide stainless steel tower that runs from April to October. The Rutschenwelt proper is themed as a space mission across two areas, Future World and Space Center, with more than a dozen rides: a 115-metre family tube, racing double and triple lanes, a 170-metre curve run, a dark tunnel, a 16-metre funnel and a spiral slide that pulls up to 3 g.

The sauna village is the largest section and is split in two by style. Indoors the design is Egyptian and oriental, with a rose-quartz bio sauna, a caldarium of brine and oxygen, an Ottoman hamam used for massage, and the Cleopatra floating pool at 12 per cent salinity. Outdoors the mood is Bavarian farmhouse, with cabins set among cottage gardens: a large gallery sauna, a Himalaya salt sauna lined with more than five tonnes of salt blocks, herb, hemp, stone-pine, lemon and hay saunas, a gondola sauna hung almost twelve metres up, and a banya at 100 °C. Cooling comes from an ice-mist crown, a gemstone grotto with a Kneipp treading pool and a glacier cabin at −4 °C; four whirlpools facing a live feed from the Ischgl ski slopes stay open all year, and rest rooms include a salt chamber, a hundred-square-metre panorama room and heated waterbeds.

The house opens daily, holidays included, from 9:00 to 22:00 and until midnight on Friday and Saturday, with bathing ending twenty minutes before closing; the two slide areas keep shorter hours of their own. The alpine Wohlfühl-Alm has its own infusion and meditation saunas.