Claudius Therme

This guide to Claudius Therme in Cologne opens with a puzzle: why a spa named for a Roman emperor sits on ground barely thirty years old. It traces a bathhouse that opened on this spot in Rheinpark in nineteen seventy-one, drawing on a mineral spring recognized as a healing spring by nineteen seventy-five, and the fire that tore through it one night in August nineteen eighty-six. You'll hear about the ten years the spring kept flowing with nowhere to surface before Cologne decided to rebuild. Stand at the drinking fountain near the entrance, still fed by the same warm mineral water.