Germany's oldest spa city — Belle Époque grandeur on the Rhine
Wiesbaden is Hesse's state capital and Germany's most elegant spa city — a Belle Époque resort where 27 hot springs feed grand 19th-century bathhouses still in use today. The Kaiser-Friedrich-Therme, built in 1913 in a Roman-Irish style, is one of Europe's most beautiful thermal baths. The city's Wilhelmstrasse — nicknamed the 'street of gentlemen' — is lined with luxury boutiques and Grand Hotel facades; the neo-classical Kurhaus (1907) houses a casino where Dostoyevsky gambled away his money. Wiesbaden was the post-WWII US Army headquarters in Germany and still has an American military pres…
Wiesbaden's hot springs were known to the Romans as Aquae Mattiacorum and exploited since the 1st century CE. The city became the fashionable resort of the German aristocracy in the 19th century, drawing royalty, composers, and gamblers — Wagner completed Das Rheingold here, Brahms worked in Wiesbaden frequently, and Dostoyevsky chronicled his disastrous casino losses in The Gambler. The city was chosen as the post-WWII headquarters of the US Forces in Europe specifically because it was relatively undamaged — its Belle Époque centre survived the war largely intact.