For years I have heard about Baden-Baden, but I’ve never found a reason to find myself to this lovely little town on the Rhine. Thanks to the summer drought in Central Europe and the low-water condition of the Rhine, I’ve finally found my excuse to get there. Given our extra unplanned Sunday in Strasbourg, a day when almost all the shops are legally closed for business (a huge constraint on Kim’s enjoyment of any place), I chose to organize a day in Baden-Baden for our litttle group of travelers. I found a service called DayTrip that provides high quality English-speaking drivers for travelers like me. Baden-Baden is about 38km from where the ship is docked in Kehl, so working backwards and assuming a 90 minute lunch break, I figured that reserving a car and driver for 7 hours would do us just fine…and that was without really knowing the lay of the land in Baden-Baden and how much time was appropriate to allocate for the visit. That meant that we were to be picked up at 9am and dropped back off at the ship at 4pm. I used Claude to design a visit to the town and than arranged through the ship concierge to get a two-hour private guided tour of the town from a local guide. this all had to be done on Saturday evening, so the timing was tight, but it all got booked and set for our day.
Along the way, I invited our new Australian friends Pat and Carmel to join us for the day since the car I hired seats up to 7 and the tour could accommodate up to 15. It was a great addition to the day to be able to add our new friends from Oz.
Baden-Baden sits in southwestern Germany, on the edge of the Black Forest. There is a pre-history in the town that goes back about 5,000 years based on archeological finds in the area. It is natural that humans would gravitate to the place based on the existence of numerous hot springs. The Romans first developed the site around AD 80 for its hot springs, naming it Aquae (later Baden, “baths”). The Emperor Caracalla, builder of the Terme de Caracalla in Rome was logically the developer of the baths location. It faded after Rome’s decline, then re-emerged as a spa town in the medieval and early modern periods. Baden-Baden’s real golden age was the 19th century when European aristocracy, royalty, and artists like Bismarck, Queen Victoria, Dostoevsky, Brahms, Turgenev and even Mark Twain frequented the baths and flocked there, earning it the nickname “Europe’s summer capital.” We got dropped off at the Trinkhalle, which is a long colonnade building in the Belle Epoque style or the late Nineteenth Century and where the hot (145 degrees Fahrenheit water) spouts for guests to take a feel and taste (careful, the mineral content is extreme and ingesting the stuff is actually not so adviseable these days). The Trinkhalle is adorned with frescoes depicting the history of Baden-Baden, and therefore makes for the perfect start for a tour of the city.
Next door to the Trinkhalle is the Kurhaus casino, opened in the 1820s. It became one of the continent’s most famous gambling houses and its easy to see why with its spectacular and elegant adornments. All of the visiting dignitaries enjoyed playing at the casino and Dostoevsky reportedly based part of his book The Gambler on his losses there. The town largely escaped WWII bombing, preserving its Belle Époque architecture, so a walk around the town, seeing the Roman baths and what are called the Irish baths proved to be very pleasant. Baden-Baden sits in a narrow valley where the Black Forest meets the Rhine plain, on the little Oos River, with wooded hills rising steeply on both sides. It feels tucked into the forest rather than open to the sky. It sits at an elevation of around 180–400m, with the town center low in the valley and villas climbing the hillsides above. The Oos River runs through the middle, channeled and landscaped rather than wild. Dense forested slopes (fir, beech) frame almost every view since the Black Forest starts right at the edge of town. Vineyards and orchards dot the surrounding hills as the terrain opens toward the Rhine. Grand 19th-century Belle Époque and neoclassical buildings dominate: cream, ochre, and pastel façades, wrought-iron balconies, mansard roofs. The Kurhaus is the visual anchor with its long, colonnaded neoclassical building fronted by a wide lawn (the Kurgarten) and flanked by casino wings. There was the end of one of the town’s three horse racing sessions (Iffezheim racecourse) taking place on this Sunday, so tents were set up in front of the Kurhaus.
The Lichtentaler Allee is a famous tree-lined promenade running for miles along the Oos, planted with rare trees, sculptures, and flower beds. There are walkways and fountains throughout and locals treat it as the town’s spine. Narrow, curving streets in the old town climb toward a hilltop medieval castle ruin (Hohenbaden) overlooking everything…more on that later. Spa buildings like the Friedrichsbad have a heavier, Renaissance-revival stone look with domes and columns. The overall feel of the town is compact and walkable, more like an elegant garden resort than a city, with manicured parks, flower displays, and quiet side streets. It’s all a mix of grandeur (casino, opera house, luxury hotels) and intimacy (narrow lanes, small squares, river walks). The green year-round backdrop from the surrounding forest gives it a soft, enclosed, almost alpine-foothill character despite being only a few hundred meters in elevation.
In 1981 Baden-Baden hosted a landmark East–West summit-style piece of diplomacy, and today it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site as one of the “Great Spa Towns of Europe” (inscribed 2021). It’s name literally means “Baths-Baths” (the town of Baden, distinguished from other Badens). The Friedrichsbad and Caracalla Therme are the two flagship bathhouses with the Friedrichsbad’s Roman-Irish bathing ritual dates to 1877. The town also hosts the Festspielhaus, one of Europe’s largest opera and concert houses. The population is small (around 55,000) and the town feels more like an elegant resort than a city.
We went for lunch to Altes Schloss (“Old Castle”), which is the hilltop ruin overlooking Baden-Baden (also called Hohenbaden). It was built in the 11th century (around 1102) by the Margraves of Baden as their original seat, on a rocky outcrop above the town. It served as the residence of the Baden margraves for roughly 400 years but was badly damaged by fire in 1599, after which the Margraves abandoned it and built the “Neues Schloss” (New Castle) down in the town itself on the hillside overlooking the old town today. The old castle was left to decay afterward, gradually becoming the picturesque ruin it is now. Partial stabilization/restoration work has been done over the centuries to keep it safe for visitors. It sits at roughly 400m elevation on a forested ridge, a steep climb or short drive above the town center. It’s a sprawling complex of weathered red sandstone walls, towers, and vaulted passages and is both atmospheric and half-open to the sky in many sections. It includes a keep, remnants of a great hall, chapel foundations, and defensive walls that Pete, Nancy and Kim walked through and climbed after our lovely German lunch in the restaurant. It’s a nice contrast to the polished spa-town core with raw stone and forest instead of Belle Époque façades. After lunch we stopped for the best pastries in town and then headed back to the boat in Kehl.
Baden-Baden’s fabled place in my thoughts did not disappoint in the least. It’s a lovely town that seems to connect the long history of the region to the elegant present of the upper echelons of German and European society today. That made it a worthwhile add-on to our Rhine cruise.