Gönen Thermal Hotel Balıkesir

Gönen Thermal Hotel, in the district of Gönen in Balıkesir province of northwestern Turkey, draws on sulfurous thermal springs that have made this Marmara region town one of Turkey's most productive and historically significant thermal centres — exploited since Byzantine times and developed into a major Turkish hamam and kaplıca (thermal bath) tradition that predates even the Ottoman period. The naturally hot sulfurous waters, emerging from the geothermal activity of the North Anatolian fault zone that runs through northwestern Turkey, are used in Turkish-style thermal bathing and modern therapeutic programmes for skin conditions, rheumatism, and respiratory ailments. Gönen's position in the Balıkesir plain between the Sea of Marmara and the Kaz Dağı (Mount Ida) mountains — the mythological home of the gods during the Trojan War, where the golden apples of the Hesperides were said to grow — provides a deeply historically charged landscape for one of northwestern Turkey's most therapeutically productive thermal destinations.