Spessart Therme

The Spessart Therme is a thermal brine bath in Bad Soden-Salmünster, a spa town in the Main-Kinzig district of Hesse at the western edge of the Spessart hills. It is run by Kur und Freizeit GmbH and stands next to the municipal spa park. The operator states that the brine, a state-recognised healing water, flows from a depth of more than 500 metres into all the pools of the bath. Two state-recognised brine springs supply the town, the Fritz-Hamm-Sprudel of 1974 and the König-Heinrich-Sprudel of 1928 and 1984, and they are used for brine baths and packs, movement therapy and aqua training, for the small graduation works and for a drinking fountain in the spa park. For the bathing landscape as a whole the operator gives a water area of 1,200 square metres, temperatures of 28 to 35 °C and pool salinity of one to ten per cent.

Each pool has its own temperature and salinity. The brine intensive pool holds pure Bad Soden brine of about ten per cent salt at 35 °C and is used for floating. The Poseidon temple, screened by a curtain of water and equipped with what the operator calls Hesse's longest bubble lounger, is at 33 °C with about 1.5 per cent salt. A current channel that starts twice an hour runs at 31 °C with about 1.5 per cent salt. The brine movement pool, at 30 °C and about two per cent salt, hosts preventive aqua-fitness courses and prescribed movement therapy and is not publicly accessible. The wave open-air pool, at 28 °C and about one per cent salt, is open only in the summer season, with waves starting ten minutes before each full hour. A separate 25-metre pool at 28 °C, built mainly for school and club sport and containing no brine, is open to bath guests at published times.

The sauna area is described by the operator as a four-star sauna with six cabins and more than eighty infusions a week, three of them housed in log buildings. They are an event sauna at 90 °C, a Russian banya at 85 °C with a kettle of birch-branch decoction, an earth sauna of polar pine set half into the ground at 100 °C, a bio herbal sauna at 55 °C, a Finnish sauna at 80 °C and a steam bath at 40 °C. A brine graduation works and a large sauna garden adjoin the cabins beside the spa park, together with a sauna bistro. Sauna admission includes the thermal brine bathing landscape.

The bath opens Monday to Saturday from 09:00 to 22:00 and the sauna until 23:00; on Sundays and public holidays both close at 20:00, and use ends 30 minutes before closing. Wednesday is a women-only sauna day outside the Hessian Christmas holidays and public holidays. Late openings until 01:30 are held on the last Saturday of each month, and candlelit SpessartLichter evenings on the first and third Friday from October to March extend opening to 23:00. Each pool is emptied once a year for maintenance; the operator publishes the dates and notes that refilling and reheating a pool takes several days, while the rest of the bath stays open.