Kurmittelhaus Staatsbad Bad Reichenhall

Bad Reichenhall is Bavaria's most renowned salt spa resort and a UNESCO World Heritage Great Spa Town of Europe, its extraordinarily potent brine springs emerging from beneath the Berchtesgaden Alps with a salinity of up to 24%, among the highest of any natural spring in Europe, and a spa tradition stretching back to the Celtic and Roman eras of salt production in these mountains. The historic Staatsbad and its monumental Kurmittelhaus — a grand 19th-century treatment complex of Byzantine-influenced red marble architecture commissioned by King Ludwig II of Bavaria — deliver the full range of salt-water bathing, inhalation, and brine spa experiences. The Alte Saline museum adjoining the thermal district tells the extraordinary story of a salt industry that shaped Bavarian economic and political history for over two thousand years, with original 19th-century pump machinery still preserved in its vast vaulted halls. Set beneath the precipitous Predigtstuhl peak with its 1928 cable car — the world's oldest still operating — and surrounded by the UNESCO Berchtesgaden Biosphere Reserve, Bad Reichenhall is one of the most dramatically Alpine and historically distinguished spa towns in the German-speaking world.