Bad Reichenhall

Bad Reichenhall in the Berchtesgadener Land district of Bavaria commands one of the most spectacular Alpine settings of any German spa town, surrounded by the Chiemgau and Berchtesgaden Alps whose peaks rise to over 2600 metres above a town that has extracted and traded its exceptionally concentrated saline spring water since the Bronze Age, when the prehistoric salt trade from this mountain source powered the rise of the Hallstatt culture. The chloride-rich brine springs, some of the most concentrated naturally occurring salt waters in Central Europe, are part of a long thermal tradition running from Roman balneal culture through the great nineteenth-century European spa era when Bad Reichenhall rivalled Bad Ischl and Baden-Baden as a destination for royalty and the wealthy bourgeoisie seeking saline bathing in Alpine air. The town's Alpine Saline museum, housed in the original nineteenth-century salt works, provides extraordinary insight into the two-thousand-year history of industrial salt extraction that shaped this mountain community.