Paymuri Hot Spring

Paymuri Hot Spring in the remote mountains of Afghanistan's interior offers thermal bathing in oligomineral and sulphurous spring water heated by the geothermal energy underlying the Hindu Kush and the complex geological zone where the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates continue their slow collision that has built the highest mountain ranges on earth over the past fifty million years. The springs provide warmth and mineral therapy in mountain valleys where the Pashtun, Tajik, and Hazara communities of the Afghan highlands have traditionally used geothermal resources for heating, bathing, and the treatment of skin and joint conditions in a folk medicine tradition largely undocumented by Western scholarship. The extraordinary natural landscape of the Afghan mountains, whose granite peaks, alpine meadows, and deep river gorges rival the scenery of any mountain region on earth, gives these thermal springs an environmental setting of spectacular beauty that the country's ongoing political difficulties have made effectively inaccessible to outside visitors for a generation.