Thermes de Capvern-les-Bains

Thermes de Capvern-les-Bains is a Pyrenean spa town in the Hautes-Pyrenees department drawing oligomineral spring water in a thermal tradition dating to the early nineteenth century, when the spring was first systematically developed for health tourism. The spa lies twenty kilometres from Lourdes, the site of the 1858 Marian apparitions that transformed a small Pyrenean market town into the second most visited Catholic pilgrimage destination on Earth after the Vatican, attracting six million pilgrims annually to drink from the spring discovered by Bernadette Soubirous. The juxtaposition of the mineral spring tradition and miraculous spring belief in the same Pyrenean river basin offers a meditation on the multiple human needs that draw people to water across the full spectrum of the rational and the devotional.