Belle époque thermal resort in Galicia. Bicarbonate-sodium springs discovered 1873. Grand hotel still standing, still filling its pools.
Mondariz sits in the Tea river valley in southern Galicia, where two bicarbonate-sodium springs were formally catalogued in 1873. Within a decade, the discovery attracted the full apparatus of fin-de-siècle European spa culture: a grand hotel, a casino, promenades, and a clientele that included Alfonso XIII. The resort is still standing and still operational.
What survives at Mondariz is not nostalgia but continuity. The springs are the same springs. The water chemistry is the same. The landscape of broad Galician skies and wet green hills is unchanged. The belle époque hotel has been restored without being sanitised. There are very few places in Europe where the 19th-century thermal resort still functions as it was designed to function.
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