The participants of our study trip to Hungary responded with great enthusiasm to the insight into a fascinating spa landscape in which centuries-old spa culture and innovative new spa and waterpark concepts are juxtaposed. The programme of the trip was organised with the support of our supporting member Eleven Kft. from Budapest. Owner Gyula Szűcs and his team proved to be great hosts. The company is the Hungarian market leader for waterslides and attractions for leisure pools and its contacts enabled the EWA group to take an exciting look behind the scenes of the thermal baths and leisure pools they visited.
The programme included the famous thermal baths of Budapest with the Gellért Bath and the Széchenyi Bath, the two most visited thermal baths in the Hungarian capital. In an impressive presentation, Szilvia Czinege, Sales & Marketing Director of the Budapest Spa Company, explained how their potential for international spa and wellness tourism was recognised and how rapidly demand has developed. She also gave the group a personal tour of the Széchenyi Baths, which became famous above all for its large outdoor thermal pools, where the people of Budapest meet all year round to bathe and also to play chess in the pool – photos of chess-playing bathers are iconic.
No less famous is the Gellért Baths, an Art Nouveau jewel with an adjoining hotel. Here, the participants of the study trip were not only able to take a look at the bathing and wellness area, but also visit the medicinal springs in the catacombs of the baths – a sweat-inducing affair, as the water comes from the rocky subsoil of the nearby Gellért Hill at 48 degrees Celsius. Hungary is richly blessed with thermal water resources. There are 118 natural healing springs in the capital alone, which have been used for drinking and bathing cures for centuries.
The second day of the study trip took us to Hungary’s second largest city, Debrecen. The city of 200,000 inhabitants is located in the east near the Romanian border and is famous for its traditional university. The Debrecen thermal baths are located right next to the alma mater. The thermal bath has been extended to include a large outdoor water park for families, with attractions designed and built by Eleven Kft. Unusual and probably unique in this form, at least in Europe, is the superstructure of the pools with an elongated sun deck, with which the sunbathing areas have been extended in a spectacular way.
Over dinner in a typical Puszta restaurant, EWA Vice-Presidents Jutta Kleiber and Oliver Sternagel thanked their Hungarian hosts for their insight into the traditional and modern aspects of Hungarian bathing culture. The conclusion of the tour group: We will be back, after all, Budapest’s Rudas Baths from the 16th century and the Hévítz Thermal Lake with its floating bathhouses are further icons of European bathing culture that are well worth a visit.
