Bad Homburg Kurpark Walk: Casino, Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad, Russian Chapel & Thai Salas

File:Bad Homburg – Peter Joseph Lenne 1789-1866 - panoramio | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: Edgar El / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0Wikimedia Commons

File:Bad Homburg, Denkmal Lenné | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: Karsten Ratzke / Wikimedia Commons, CC0Wikimedia Commons

Welcome to the Kurpark of Bad Homburg. On this walk we explore the park as the setting of a world-famous spa: its monuments and healing springs, the casino and the bathhouse, a Russian chapel, Germany's oldest golf course and two pavilions from Siam. We begin with the man who designed it. The bronze bust on the granite…

Photo: Dguendel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

File:Bad-homburg-kurpark-kaiser-friedrich-III-denkmal-002 - Wikimedia Commons | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / google images cc, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

File:Bad Homburg – Kaiser Friedrich III. - panoramio | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: giggel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0Wikimedia Commons

+1 more

On this oval ornamental square, the Schmuckplatz, two busts face each other across the lawn. They show Kaiser Friedrich III and his wife Victoria, known as 'Kaiserin Friedrich'. Both are larger than life, carved in white Tyrolean marble by the Berlin sculptor Joseph Uphues, and they stand on tall granite pedestals. Fri…

File:Bad Homburg – Hotel Villa Kisseleff - panoramio | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: giggel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0Wikimedia Commons

This villa at Kisseleffstraße 19 was built around 1842 as one of the homes of Countess Sophie Kisseleff, a Polish-born aristocrat married to the Russian count Pavel Kiselyov. From the early 1840s she spent much of her life in Homburg, and by 1843 she already owned four country houses along the avenue leading to the spr…

Bad Homburg Russische Kapelle | wikimedia.org

Photo: MdE / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 deWikimedia Commons

Bad Homburg vor der Höhe Russische Kirche 3 | wikimedia.org

Photo: Zairon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons

Bad Homburg vor der Höhe Russische Kirche 1 | wikimedia.org

Photo: Zairon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons

+2 more

The golden onion dome above the trees belongs to the Russian Orthodox Church of All Saints, usually just called the Russian Chapel. It was built on the initiative of a Russian state councillor and spa guest, Alexei Proworoff, who raised the money with help from the Russian embassy church in Berlin; the town provided th…

Bad Homburg – Restaurant „Golfhaus“ im Kurpark mit 6-Loch-Golfanlage "Old Course" - panoramio (cropped) | wikimedia.org

Photo: giggel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0Wikimedia Commons

Bad Homburg, Kurpark. Golfhaus, Rückseite | wikimedia.org

Photo: Karsten Ratzke / Wikimedia Commons, CC0Wikimedia Commons

Bad Homburg – Restaurant „Golfhaus“ im Kurpark mit 6-Loch-Golfanlage "Old Course" - panoramio | wikimedia.org

Photo: giggel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0Wikimedia Commons

In front of you is the Old Course of the Royal Homburger Golf Club 1899: six short holes among the old trees of the Kurpark, the shortest just 60 metres long and the longest 120. It may look modest, but the club calls it the oldest golf course in Germany. The course was laid out in 1889 with the Prince of Wales – later…

Bad Homburg, Kurpark. Orangerie, Rückseite | wikimedia.org

Photo: Karsten Ratzke / Wikimedia Commons, CC0Wikimedia Commons

Innenraum Orangerie | wikimedia.org

Photo: Huber1911 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0Wikimedia Commons

This elegant building is the Kurpark Orangerie – not to be confused with the much older orangery in the palace park. It was built in 1844 to keep the orange trees of Elector Wilhelm II of Hesse safe through the winter. According to legend, he paid off gambling debts with forty orange trees, and so an orangery was sudde…

Photo: Expedition

Elisabethenbrunnen-Bad-Homburg-JR-G6-1793-2007-08-06 | 🔗 wikipedia.org

Photo: Johannes Robalotoff / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0 DEJohannes Robalotoff, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons

Photo: Expedition

+2 more

Now we reach the Elisabethenbrunnen, the most famous of Bad Homburg's springs. Its water was rediscovered in 1834 by the physician Eduard Christian Trapp and named after Landgravine Elizabeth, a daughter of King George III. When the chemist Justus von Liebig analysed it, he declared that it would be hard to find a mine…

Photo: MdE / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Among the old salt meadows stands a golden pavilion that looks as if it had come straight from Bangkok. This is Sala Thai II, the younger of Bad Homburg's two Thai salas. Its story begins in 1907. In the late summer of that year King Chulalongkorn of Siam came to Bad Homburg for a cure. During his stay he opened a newl…

Datei:Bad-homburg-kurpark-kaiser-wilhelms-bad-innen-005 | 🔗 wikipedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikipedia DE (Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad)

Datei:Bad-homburg-kurpark-kaiser-wilhelms-bad-innen-002 | 🔗 wikipedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikipedia DE (Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad)

Kurpark-hg-kaiser-wilhelms-bad-004 | 🔗 wikipedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikipedia DE (Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad)

Before us rises the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad, the grandest building of the old spa. It was built from 1887 to 1890 to designs by the architect Louis Jacobi, in the style of the Italian High Renaissance, and opened in 1890 as a bathhouse. It was first called the Fürstenbad, the Princes' Bath, and was later named in honour of…

File:Bad Homburg – Spielbank im Kurpark - panoramio | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: giggel / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0Wikimedia Commons

File:Bad Homburg Spielbank | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: Karsten11 / Wikimedia Commons, Public domainWikimedia Commons

File:Bad Homburg Spielbank Front | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: Karsten11 / Wikimedia Commons, Public domainWikimedia Commons

The Spielbank, Bad Homburg's casino, likes to call itself the 'Mother of Monte Carlo'. In 1838 Landgrave Ludwig of Hessen-Homburg met the twin brothers François and Louis Blanc, who were running a gambling hall in Luxembourg. On 19 July 1840 he granted them a 30-year licence for a casino in Homburg. In return they had …

Kurpark-hg-bircher-benner-denkmal-001 | wikimedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons

This bronze bust honours a Swiss doctor whose name you may know from the breakfast table: Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner, the man behind Bircher muesli. Bircher-Benner, who lived from 1867 to 1939, was a pioneer of whole-food and raw-food nutrition. At his clinic in Zurich he served patients a simple dish of soaked oa…

Bad Homburg – Friedrich Hölderlin - panoramio | wikimedia.org

Photo: Edgar El / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0Wikimedia Commons

Bad-homburg-kurpark-hoelderlin-denkmal-002a | wikimedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / google images cc, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Bad-homburg-kurpark-hoelderlin-denkmal-002 | wikimedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons

+1 more

This monument honours the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, who lived in Homburg twice: from 1798 to 1800 and again from 1804 to 1806. Hölderlin came here from Frankfurt, where he had worked as a tutor in the house of the banker Gontard and fallen in love with the banker's wife, Susette – the 'Diotima' of his writings. In Homb…

File:Bad Homburg vor der Höhe Thai Sala 6 | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: Zairon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons

File:Bad Homburg vor der Höhe Thai Sala 1 | 🔗 wikimedia.org

Photo: Zairon / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikimedia Commons

Bad-homburg-kurpark-siamesischer-tempel-011 | 🔗 wikipedia.org

Photo: Dontworry / Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0Wikipedia DE (Thai-Salas Bad Homburg)

+2 more

Our walk ends at the older of the two Thai salas, often called the Siamesischer Tempel, the Siamese Temple. This is the pavilion that King Chulalongkorn gave Bad Homburg after his cure in 1907, in gratitude for the town's hospitality and his recovery. It was made in Bangkok, taken apart and shipped to Germany, and it a…