Sources Thermales de Kos

Sources Thermales de Kos draws chlorurated geothermal water on the island of Kos in the southeastern Aegean, where submarine and coastal hot springs warmed by the volcanic system of the nearby Nisyros caldera have been used for therapeutic bathing since antiquity in an island most famous as the birthplace and life's work of Hippocrates, the fifth-century physician whose foundational clinical method established the rational basis of Western medicine. The Plane Tree of Hippocrates in Kos Town, a venerable eastern plane said to have spread its shade when the physician taught his students beneath its branches, is the oldest cultivated tree in Europe at some 2,500 years of age, its vast trunk of twelve metres circumference now propped on scaffolding that has become as much a monument as the tree itself. Bathing in the geothermal waters of an island where Hippocrates formulated his observation that hot springs were beneficial for musculoskeletal pain makes the thermal experience here a direct dialogue with the origins of European medical thought.