Gradierwerk Bad Pyrmont

Gradierwerk Bad Pyrmont is a celebrated open-air graduation tower in Bad Pyrmont, Lower Saxony, Germany, where sodium, chloride, ferruginous, and carbonate-rich brine trickles down bundled blackthorn twigs to produce a natural saline aerosol that has been part of the spa town's tradition since the seventeenth century. Bad Pyrmont was one of eighteenth-century Europe's most fashionable spa resorts — Leibniz, Voltaire, and Tsar Peter the Great were among its distinguished visitors — and the Gradierwerk remains one of Germany's most distinctive and historically significant thermal structures. Visitors walk through the salt-laden mist produced by the graduation tower, experiencing one of Europe's most authentic and time-honored forms of natural mineral tradition in this historic spa park.