Alma-Arasan Sanatorium

Alma-Arasan Sanatorium draws sulfated mineral springs in the Almaty Alatau gorge fifteen kilometres south of Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city and former capital, where the geothermal water emerging from the granite formations of the northern Tian Shan has been developed into a therapeutic sanatorium complex set in the dramatic landscape of the Alma-Arasan canyon, its slopes of spruce and wild apple forest giving way to the bare granite ridges that define the visual character of the mountains above the former Soviet capital. The Tian Shan range, the Celestial Mountains of the ancient Silk Road geography, extends 2,500 kilometres from Xinjiang in China across Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan in one of the world's great mountain systems, and the northern Tian Shan above Almaty, accessible by road from the city in under an hour, provides skiing, hiking, and Alpine wilderness recreation at distances from an urban centre of 2.2 million people that few major cities in the world can match for the quality and proximity of the mountain environment. The sulfated springs of Alma-Arasan, appreciated for relaxation and joint comfort in the Central Asian thermal tradition, flow in a canyon whose Soviet sanatorium architecture of concrete and glass occupies a position of vertiginous alpine grandeur that juxtaposes the ideological vocabulary of Soviet institutional design with one of the most spectacular mountain settings in Central Asia.