Baile Tusnad Mineral Spa

Băile Tușnad Mineral Spa is a therapeutic mineral spring resort in Băile Tușnad, the smallest town in Romania with only around 1,500 residents, set in a spectacular Carpathian river gorge in Harghita County deep in the Szekely Land of eastern Transylvania, a predominantly Hungarian-speaking region where the Szekely people — considered a distinctive sub-group of the Hungarian nation with their own historical traditions and folk culture — maintain a strong cultural identity expressed through their distinctive carved gateway (kapu) tradition, their intricately patterned folk textiles, and their passionate attachment to the surrounding Carpathian landscapes that have been their homeland for a millennium. The town lies immediately below Saint Anna Lake (Sfânta Ana), Romania's only volcanic crater lake and one of the most beautiful small lakes in Eastern Europe, whose perfectly circular turquoise waters fill an extinct volcanic crater amid beech and spruce forest in a setting of tranquil geological wonder. The iron-rich, bicarbonate-ferruginous mineral spring waters of Tușnad, used since the 18th century for cardiovascular therapeutic applications and recognized in Romanian balneotherapy for their effects on blood pressure and heart function, flow through this tiny Szekely spa town in one of the most scenically dramatic and culturally distinctive thermal bathing settings in all of the Carpathian mountain world.