Balneario Nuestra Señora Fitero

Balneario Nuestra Señora Fitero, in the small Navarrese town of Fitero near the Castilian border, draws on sulfate thermal springs that made this quiet Ribera de Navarra community one of the most celebrated spa destinations in 19th-century Spain — it was here that Romantic poet Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer composed some of his most celebrated Rimas and prose poems during a stay in the valley, immortalising Fitero's thermal waters and melancholy landscape in Spanish Romantic literature. The naturally warm sulfate waters, extracted from the gypsum and marl formations of the Ebro basin, are part of a long thermal tradition within the Spanish balneario culture. Fitero's handsome Cistercian monastery — one of the oldest in Navarre, founded by Saint Raymond of Fitero in the 12th century — gives this small spa town a cultural depth entirely disproportionate to its modest size.