Caldas de Reis

Caldas de Reis in the province of Pontevedra, Galicia, is one of the oldest continuously used thermal towns in Galicia, with bicarbonate-sodium springs that have been channelled into public bathing facilities since the Middle Ages and Roman times before that. The town sits on the Camino Portugués — the Portuguese route of the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage — and pilgrims have bathed in its hot springs for a thousand years as a restorative halt on the journey to the shrine of Saint James in Santiago de Compostela. Today the town's municipal thermal baths remain free or low-cost and genuinely public in the Galician thermal tradition, maintaining the accessibility that has characterised these springs throughout their long history. The surrounding landscape of the lower Ulla valley, with its slate-roofed stone farmhouses, oak forests, Albariño vineyards and the Rías Baixas seafood culture of the adjacent estuary coast, provides a quintessentially Galician backdrop.