Strathpeffer Spa

Strathpeffer is a Victorian spa village in Ross and Cromarty in the Scottish Highlands, the only inland spa resort in Scotland, whose ferruginous and sulfurous spring waters attracted the Victorian aristocracy and the British royal family in the latter half of the 19th century to take the cure in the elegant wooden pavilions and grand hotels of what became known as the Biarritz of the North. The mineral springs, known since the 17th century, rise from the Devonian Old Red Sandstone geology of the Black Isle peninsula, producing iron-rich and sulfurous waters used historically for rheumatic and skin conditions. The Victorian spa architecture — the pump room pavilion, the grand spa hotels, the ornamental gardens, and the Highland Railway terminus that brought Victorian society north — survives in remarkable completeness, making Strathpeffer one of the best-preserved 19th-century spa townscapes in the British Isles.