Barack Thermal Resort

Barack Thermal Resort stands a few steps from the Tisza at Tiszakécske, on the southern Hungarian plain. The complex began as the town's cooperative-built thermal bath, opened in 1971 on a well sunk the year before, and has been in the hands of the Szabó family since 1984, first as managers, then as tenants and finally as owners. The bath has been extended in steps ever since — a covered pool hall, a sauna world with medical and wellness departments in 2011, a fifty-room hotel in 2014, twelve Natura apartments in 2017 — and has traded under the Barack Thermal Resort name since 2019. Despite the resort framing, the bath is a public one: it sells day tickets to visitors who are not staying, and it carries its own bathing-establishment registration (Gyógy- és Élményfürdő KF21029130) separate from the hotel, apartments and campsite.

The medicinal water rises from 1,344 metres at 52 °C and is described by the operator as soft, high in fluoride and in sodium hydrogen carbonate. It is piped fresh into the outdoor pools each dawn and cooled to the certified bathing temperatures of 36 and 38 °C. The bath lists it against rheumatic and joint complaints, bone and spinal disease, post-operative rehabilitation and accident aftercare, gynaecological conditions, inflamed joints, and — taken as a drinking cure — excess stomach acid. A rheumatologist holds a weekly consultation on Monday afternoons, and treatments are available both privately and with Hungarian social-insurance support.

The bath counts ten pools over roughly 1,500 square metres of water, seven of them usable in winter. Indoors there is a 25 by 14.4 metre swimming pool at 26 to 28 °C, a jacuzzi at 32 to 34 °C and a children's pool at 31 to 33 °C. Outdoors the two medicinal pools, both a metre deep, sit apart from the play area; a circular experience pool at 32 to 34 °C carries neck showers, a bubble bed and underwater jets, and the seasonal side adds a beach pool with the slide park, an adventure pool with a water mushroom, a water volcano and two children's slides, and a very shallow toddler pool. The slide park itself runs to a two-lane family slide, a rafting-pendulum hybrid, a steep Kamikaze and the coiling Anaconda.

The sauna world holds five cabins at graded heats — an infrared cabin at 40 to 45 °C, a peach-aroma cabin at 55 to 60 °C, a relax sauna at 65 °C, and Finnish saunas indoors and outdoors at 90 to 100 °C, the outdoor one used for guided sauna sessions — supported by a steam cabin, a salt chamber, a Kneipp walk, a 16 °C plunge pool and a plunge tub beside the outdoor sauna. The bath is open every day of the year, 9:00 to 20:00, with pools closing at 19:45 and the sauna world running 10:00 to 19:45; the slide park is seasonal. Restaurants, an aqua bar, a hotel, thermal and Natura apartments and a campsite complete the site.