Bad Homburg Kurpark

Here we are at our first stop, the Lenné Monument, where the park meets the Kaiser-Friedrich-Promenade. Look first at the bronze bust on its granite pedestal. Then turn and look into the park behind you, because that view is his work. The bust shows Peter Joseph Lenné, the most celebrated garden designer of nineteenth-century Prussia. He was born in Bonn in 1789 into a family of court gardeners, and he rose to become director-general of all the royal gardens of Prussia. Much of the landscape around Potsdam, from Sanssouci to the Peacock Island, carries his signature. So why is he here? The answer is the casino. When the twin brothers François and Louis Blanc took over the gambling licence in Homburg, their contract obliged them to create a public park in the English style. François Blanc hired the best. Lenné inspected the ground in 1852, and over the next five years he came back again and again, once staying for two whole summer months. That was unusual attention from a man with commissions all over Germany. In 1854 he designed the heart of the park, the area between the Schwedenpfad, the promenade, Kisseleffstraße and the Paul-Ehrlich-Weg. Look at what he made of it. There are no straight avenues, no clipped hedges. Instead you see wide, open lawns, groups of trees placed like scenery on a stage, and paths that curve so gently you hardly notice you are being led. What mattered most to Lenné were sightlines, views that guide your eye from one point to the next. Many of the great trees around you go back to that time, and the park today counts more than two thousand large trees. It is often said to be the only one of Lenné's parks that survives essentially unchanged. The bust has had an eventful life of its own. A first bronze, a copy of a portrait by the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch, was set up in the park in 1938. It went missing after the Second World War, was recovered from the Swan Pond, put back on display, and in 1982 it was stolen for good. The bust you see now is by the Bad Homburg sculptor Otto Weber-Hartl, his own interpretation of Rauch's portrait. Now let's continue. A short walk brings us to an oval lawn where an emperor and an empress face each other.

We've reached the Schmuckplatz, the oval ornamental square. Stand where you can see both ends of the lawn. In each curve of the oval a white marble bust rises on a tall granite pedestal, and the two figures gaze at each other across the grass: Emperor Friedrich the Third and his wife Victoria, known in Germany as the Empress Frederick. Theirs is one of the great what-ifs of German history. Victoria was the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of Britain. She and Friedrich shared liberal ideas, and many hoped that once he came to the throne, Germany would take a more liberal course. But when Friedrich finally became emperor in March 1888, he was already dying of cancer of the larynx. He reigned for only ninety-nine days. The crown passed to their son, Wilhelm the Second, whose views were far more conservative. Homburg had good reason to remember Friedrich. As crown prince, in 1878, he made the old landgraves' palace in town a summer residence, a decision that tied the Prussian royal house closely to Homburg. After his death the town joined its upper and lower promenades into one and named it the Kaiser-Friedrich-Promenade, the street right beside us. It also launched an appeal for a monument. The Berlin sculptor Joseph Uphues won the commission, and the widowed empress came to see his design and approved it. When the bust was unveiled in May 1892, the ceremony was deliberately small. The empress was still in mourning, and the donations had fallen short, so members of the monument committee had to pay the rest out of their own pockets. As a widow, Victoria built herself a castle not far from here, in Kronberg in the Taunus, and named it Friedrichshof after her husband. After her death in 1901, Uphues was asked for a matching bust. Walk over to her and look closely. She appears young and idealised, in court dress with a diadem, holding a rose. This time there was nothing modest about the unveiling. In August 1902 her son, Kaiser Wilhelm the Second, unveiled it himself, as a state occasion with full military ceremony, during his yearly stay in Homburg. So here they stand, facing each other for ever: the couple who might have changed Germany. On to the next stop. A short walk north brings us to the memorial of a poet who came to Homburg with a broken heart.

We've reached the Hölderlin memorial. Look for the slender stone stele with a white marble portrait medallion. It honours Friedrich Hölderlin, today counted among the greatest poets of the German language. Homburg was the stage for both his brightest hopes and his darkest years. The story begins in Frankfurt. In 1796 the young Hölderlin became tutor in the house of the banker Jakob Friedrich Gontard, and he fell deeply in love with the banker's wife, Susette. She was cultivated, musical and famously beautiful, and she returned his love. In his novel Hyperion she became Diotima, the ideal beloved. In September 1798, after a quarrel with her husband, Hölderlin had to leave the house in a hurry. He fled here, to Homburg, to his friend from student days, the young diplomat Isaac von Sinclair. What followed was a love lived in secret. For almost two years the couple met only rarely, and they did not trust their letters to the post. They handed them over during brief meetings, across a fence and a hedge. To do that, Hölderlin walked from Homburg to Frankfurt and back in all weathers, some thirty kilometres in all. Seventeen of Susette's letters survive, because he hid them in a secret compartment of his travelling case. In one of the last she wrote: you are imperishable within me, and you will remain as long as I remain. In May 1800 she ended the affair. Two years later she died in Frankfurt, of German measles. Hölderlin came back to Homburg in 1804. Sinclair, by now the landgrave's leading minister, found him a post as court librarian and paid the salary out of his own pocket. In these years his famous short poem Hälfte des Lebens, Half of Life, appeared in print. But his mind was breaking down. In September 1806 he was forced into a carriage and taken to a clinic in Tübingen. He spent the second half of his life, more than thirty-five years, in a tower room above the river Neckar. Homburg took its time to honour him. A memorial was first proposed in 1870, for his hundredth birthday. It was meant for the Wingertsberg, a hillside he had called his favourite spot in a letter to his sister, but the Franco-Prussian War stopped the plans. The stele was finally unveiled in 1883 near the park's pond, and in 1943 it was moved here, close to the Schmuckplatz. Today a walking trail, the Hölderlinpfad, runs between Homburg and Frankfurt, said to follow the route of his secret journeys. Let's continue towards Kisseleffstraße, and the villa of a woman whose passion was not poetry but roulette.

Pause here at the Hotel Villa Kisseleff on Kisseleffstraße. The street and the house are both named after one of the most talked-about guests in the history of the spa: Countess Sophie Kisseleff. She was born Zofia Potocka in 1801, a daughter of one of the richest magnate families of Poland. At twenty she was married to Pavel Kiselyov, a Russian general and a favourite of the Tsar, who later became a minister. It was not a happy match. After their little son died, the couple separated in 1829, although they were never allowed to divorce. Sophie moved west, sold much of her property, invested in French securities and speculated on the stock exchange, which made her even richer. From the early 1840s Homburg became her second home. By 1843 she owned four country houses along what was then called the avenue to the springs. This villa was built around 1842 as one of her residences. In 1857, while she was still alive, the oldest stretch of this street was named after her. The reason she came was the casino, which had opened in 1841. The countess was a compulsive gambler. She could spend whole days at the tables and lose enormous sums. But she was also a shareholder in the casino, so part of what she lost at roulette came back to her as dividends. In a way, she was playing against herself. Writers noticed her. Robert Louis Stevenson, the future author of Treasure Island, spent four weeks in Homburg in 1862 as a boy of eleven, in a hotel on this very street. He never forgot the old countess. The worst thing he saw there, he later recalled, was this immensely old and frail woman with a wicked face, who came to the gaming tables night after night and day after day, where a chair was kept for her. In fact she was only about sixty. The local historian Gerta Walsh believed that Fyodor Dostoevsky met her too, on his first visit to Homburg in 1863, and that she inspired the formidable Russian grandmother in his novel The Gambler, who has herself carried to the roulette table in her chair and loses a fortune within days. That is an interpretation, not a proven fact, but a tempting one. Another Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol, had already lodged on this street in 1845. Today the villa is a hotel. From here we head south-east. Watch for a flash of gold above the trees: an onion dome.

Here is the golden onion dome we glimpsed through the trees. This is the Russian Orthodox Church of All Saints, usually just called the Russian Chapel. Stand back far enough to take in the whole building before we look at the details. Why is there a Russian church in a German spa park? After the casino closed in 1872, Russian guests at first stayed away. But from the 1890s they returned in large numbers, helped by a German-Russian trade treaty of 1894 that made changing money easier. One of them was a Russian state councillor named Proworoff, a regular spa guest nicknamed the Rose Cavalier. He took the initiative and raised the money, with the help of the Russian embassy church in Berlin and a church brotherhood, and the town provided the land here in the park. Long before that, this spot was occupied by a graduation tower, a Gradierwerk, for salt production: a tall frame of brushwood over which salty spring water trickled, so that it evaporated and the brine grew stronger. Homburg's springs were used to make salt for centuries before anyone came here to be healed. On the sixteenth of October 1896, the foundation stone was laid in the presence of Tsar Nicholas the Second and Tsarina Alexandra. The couple were staying in Darmstadt, the Tsarina's home town, for she was born a princess of Hesse-Darmstadt. Walk round to the north wall and look for the cross that marks the stone. When the church was consecrated in September 1899, the imperial couple were not there, but the Empress Frederick was, the widow whose bust we saw at the Schmuckplatz. The architect was Leonti Benois from St Petersburg, the grandfather of the actor Peter Ustinov. At the same time he was building a Russian church in Darmstadt for the Tsar and Tsarina. The work on site was led by Louis Jacobi, Homburg's busiest architect, whose name will come up again on this walk. Benois blended the style of Russian churches of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with touches of Art Nouveau. Now look closely. Pale sandstone frames the walls, with red brick in between. Colourful glazed tiles decorate the corners and the frieze beneath the eaves, among them tiles with the Russian double-headed eagle. Fine gilded metalwork edges the slate roofs, and above it all rises the onion dome, clad in gilded copper and crowned by an Orthodox cross. If the door is open, you'll see a domed interior painted blue with golden stars, and a carved iconostasis, the screen of icons in front of the altar. The church belongs to the town, and services are still held here in German and Church Slavonic. Just to the north-east lies a small golf course with a big claim. Let's move on.

We're now at the Old Course of the Royal Homburger Golf Club. Look across the grass between the old trees, and you may spot small greens and flags. It looks like a modest pitch-and-putt: six short holes, the shortest just sixty metres long, the longest a hundred and twenty. But the greens are tiny, only about thirty square metres, guarded by bunkers, and you have to play through the trees. And this little course is the oldest in Germany. How did golf come to a German spa? Through the British. By the late nineteenth century, Homburg was one of the favourite summer resorts of Europe's high society, and the British came in force. The most famous of them was Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, the future King Edward the Seventh, and an uncle of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second. He spent summers here too, and he even made a local fashion famous: the felt hat with a single dent along the crown that the world still calls a homburg. The British brought their sports with them. The Kurpark had tennis courts by 1876, among the oldest on the Continent. And in 1889, with the Prince of Wales as patron, the first golf course was laid out here in the park. Only Pau, in south-western France, has an older course on the European mainland. In 1891 the first golf tournament on German soil was played on this course. The club was formally founded in 1899, mostly by English aristocrats, and its first president was the Duke of Cambridge. In 1905 the club created the Homburg Gold Cups. They are the oldest trophies in German golf, and they are still played for every year. The royal connection was never forgotten. In April 2013 Queen Elizabeth the Second granted the club permission to call itself Royal, the only golf club in Germany with that title. Even so, the Old Course is one of the few public golf courses in the country, so golfers with the right qualification can play it today. The clubhouse beside the course, now home to the Golfhaus restaurant, was rebuilt some years ago in the style of the original from the early nineteen hundreds. Picture the first players here, Englishmen with hickory clubs, threading their shots between Lenné's trees, while across the park the spa guests took their waters. From here, let's follow the paths east, towards a long, pale building with a colonnade, facing the springs.

We've arrived at the Kurpark Orangerie. Face the long front with its open colonnade of slender columns. This is not the much older orangery in the palace park in town; this one belongs to the spa. It was built in 1844, and its origin story is pure Homburg. The building was needed to shelter forty orange trees through the winter, trees that had belonged to Elector Wilhelm the Second of Hesse. According to the story, the elector had lost heavily at the casino and had to hand the trees over to the Blanc brothers to settle his gambling debts. Whether or not every detail is true, the casino suddenly owned an orange grove, and orange trees need a warm house for the winter. Look at the architecture. It is a long, low building in a late Classical style, with a hipped roof. The colonnade on the front, facing the Brunnenallee, softens the line between park and interior, and large windows flood the main hall with daylight, the light the citrus trees once needed through the dark months. The building changed its role with the fashions of the spa. When the winter cure came into vogue, it became a so-called Madeira house, filled with exotic plants, because simply spending time close to plants was believed to be good for your health. In 1906 Louis Jacobi, the architect we met at the Russian Chapel, was asked to turn it into a Wandelhalle, a covered promenade, and by 1909 the work was done. Now guests could stroll and sip their mineral water even when it rained. In the 1970s it became part of the spa centre, with a spring-water bar, a café and a concert hall. After a thorough renovation it reopened in 2010 as a café and restaurant, and today it is also used for events. At the back, a terrace looks out over the Froschkönigteich, the Frog King pond. Now step back onto the Brunnenallee and look along it. This long axis was laid out in 1835 to link all the springs. It was first lined with poplars, and around 1860 horse chestnuts took their place. Notice how different it feels from Lenné's curving paths: this is the working axis of the spa, where guests walked from spring to spring for their drinking cure. The springs that made Homburg rich are strung out along it. Just across the avenue stands the most famous of them all. Shall we move on?

Now we reach the Elisabethenbrunnen, the spring that, more than any other, made Homburg a spa town. Look first at the round temple, open on all sides, with a white marble goddess seated at its centre. Then come closer, because some of the best details only show up near at hand. The spring is named after Landgravine Elizabeth, a daughter of King George the Third of Britain. In 1818, at the age of forty-seven, she married the heir to tiny Hesse-Homburg, and her English dowry and allowance helped to remodel the palace in town. She died in 1840, just before the casino opened and the spa took off. The water was known long before it was famous. Isaac von Sinclair, Hölderlin's friend, mentioned this spring in 1799 in a work on salt-making in Homburg, because back then it was used for salt. The turning point came in 1834, when the physician Eduard Christian Trapp rediscovered it as a healing spring. He persuaded the landgrave to pay for an analysis by the famous chemist Justus von Liebig. The report cost four hundred guilders, and its verdict was exactly what a would-be spa needed. It would be hard, Liebig wrote, to find a mineral water in Germany as rich in active ingredients as the water of Homburg. It is a salty, naturally sparkling water, about ten degrees cool, and it was prescribed above all for stomach and bowel complaints. The spring was redesigned five times. What you see now was based on ideas of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second himself and worked out by the Berlin sculptor Hans Dammann from 1916, in the middle of the First World War. The goddess is Hygieia, the Greek goddess of health. The cost of one hundred thousand marks was donated by the industrialist Wilhelm Becker, whose steel works were profiting heavily from arms contracts. Dammann explained that the Kaiser wanted building to start during the war, so that brave soldiers and the wounded could soon benefit from the water. Not everyone saw it that way. In August 1916 the head of the Kaiser's naval cabinet, Admiral Georg Alexander von Müller, noted in his diary his outrage that the Kaiser spent hours on a fountain temple in Homburg, paid for by a war supplier, while refusing to read Hindenburg's report on the situation in the East, because he had no time. Now look below the temple. Down in the forecourt you'll find a small spring house supported by caryatids, carved female figures serving as columns. When you're ready, let's continue north along the springs, to a younger one under a glass dome, with a smell all of its own.

Here a tall pavilion of cast iron rises above the spring, crowned with a glass dome. This is the Louisenbrunnen. Look up first: fourteen metres of delicate ironwork, quite unlike the stone and marble of the springs around it. Then step closer to the tap at its foot, and you may notice the smell. People have long called this the Schwefelquelle, the sulphur spring. The town's own website jokes that the water seems to have taken a shortcut through hell on its way up. And yet, after it was drilled in 1856 or 1857, it was much in demand for heart and circulatory complaints, and it is said to have been a favourite of Russian spa guests. Later, tastes turned against it, and it came to be described as undrinkable for European palates. The spring is named after Landgravine Louise, and hers is a quiet story. Louise was a princess of Anhalt-Dessau, born in 1798, and deaf from birth. In 1818 she married Prince Gustav of Hesse-Homburg, one of the sons of Landgrave Friedrich the Fifth. Gustav was also her uncle, her mother's brother. Her deafness is thought to be one reason why the couple chose to live rather withdrawn. Louise had grown up in Dessau, beside the famous Garden Realm of Dessau-Wörlitz, laid out on the English model and today a World Heritage site. In Homburg she and Gustav turned their own garden, today's Gustavsgarten on the Tannenwaldallee, into a romantic retreat with groups of trees, curving lawns and exotic plants. From 1830 a small Doric temple there served the family as a tea salon. Gustav became landgrave only in 1846, and his reign lasted barely two years. In January 1848 their only son, not yet eighteen, died of influenza as a student in Bonn, and that September Gustav himself died. Louise lived on as a widow in Homburg for nearly ten more years, until 1858. In those years Lenné was shaping the heart of this park, in the landscape style she had known since childhood. The spring itself has had a second life. Between the wars it was neglected, its pavilion was taken down, and the tap was moved to the nearby Landgrafenbrunnen. In 2022 the spring was restored at its original site. Then, in May 2025, the Stiftung Historischer Kurpark, a foundation that cares for this park, unveiled the rebuilt pavilion, paid for entirely by donations. If you are curious, take a little water from the tap and try it. Then decide for yourself whether Louise's spring deserves its nickname. Now let's walk a few steps east, into the old salt meadows, to a gift from Thailand.

Among the old salt meadows stands a golden pavilion that looks as if it had been carried here from Bangkok. This is Sala Thai Two, the younger of Bad Homburg's two Thai salas. It is a little hidden away. The way in from the park leads through the scent and touch garden, created in 1983 for visitors with impaired sight. Its story begins in the late summer of 1907. King Chulalongkorn of Siam, Rama the Fifth, came to Homburg for a cure. He was suffering from heart and kidney trouble, and he stayed for a month, from late August to late September, in a villa belonging to the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten. He was a remarkable monarch, the first king of Siam to build direct ties with the royal houses of Europe. He was also an honest diarist. In his letters home, later published as a travel diary, he complained about the bad food and the cold, rough weather. And yet the cure did him good. During his stay a new spring was drilled here in the meadows and named after him, the Chulalongkorn spring, and the town presented him with a festive dedication ceremony. On the twentieth of September he celebrated his fifty-fourth birthday in Homburg, with great sympathy from the townspeople. In return, the king gave the town a sala, a traditional Thai pavilion, meant to shelter his spring. But as we'll hear at the end of our walk, that first sala never reached this spot. A century later the circle closed. For the hundredth anniversary of the royal visit, King Bhumibol and Queen Sirikit gave Bad Homburg this second sala. It was built close to the Chulalongkorn spring and inaugurated on the twentieth of September 2007, the old king's birthday. So the spring finally received its pavilion, a hundred years late. Take a moment to look at the steep, tiered roofs and the gilded decoration shining against the green. Bad Homburg is the only city in the world outside Thailand with two of these pavilions, and the friendship is still celebrated. Most years the park hosts one of the largest Thai festivals in Germany, usually on a weekend in August, organised with the Royal Thai Embassy. Along the Brunnenallee there is Thai food, classical dance, and displays of Thai martial arts such as Muay Thai. Now let's head north-west, to the grand bathhouse where the king took his cure.

Before us rises the Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad, the grandest building of the old spa. Take in the whole façade first: the central dome, the pavilions that step forward at either end, the columned portico at the entrance, and the warm mix of red sandstone and yellow brick. It was built because the spa had a problem. For decades the bathhouses had stood so far from the springs that people feared the water would lose its quality on the way. A modern bathhouse close to the springs was discussed for years. At last, on the twenty-second of March 1887, the foundation stone was laid, on the ninetieth birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm the First, after whom the building is named. At first it was called the Fürstenbad, the Princes' Bath. The architect was Louis Jacobi once again, Homburg's own master builder, the man who also rebuilt the Roman fort of the Saalburg up in the Taunus. He gave the bathhouse the look of an Italian High Renaissance palace, and it opened in 1890. Inside, mineral baths and showers, bubbling brine baths, inhalation and massage were all brought together under one roof, in tall halls decorated with fine tiles and mosaics. In 1906 mud-bath cabins were added, and in the 1930s a department for clay-mud treatments. Famous guests included the Prince of Wales, Otto von Bismarck in 1890, and in 1907 King Chulalongkorn of Siam, who followed his diet cure here. A report from his stay noted that the king had his spring framed with a splendid pavilion, to be the memory of a kind and generous monarch. Now turn to the statue. Kaiser Wilhelm the First stands in bronze, three and a half metres tall, by the sculptor Fritz Gerth, on a base of red Swedish granite. It was unveiled in September 1905 in the presence of the imperial family. The gardens in front were laid out by the Siesmayer firm, the gardeners who looked after the Kurpark in Lenné's spirit from 1881 until the 1930s. In recent years the star-shaped flower bed has been restored and the trees at the sides cut back, so that the building can again be seen as its planners intended. The Kaiser-Wilhelms-Bad is still at the heart of spa life. It houses the Kur-Royal day spa, where the healing water is still used, and it is the seat of the town's spa and congress company. A short walk south brings us to the building that paid for so much of all this: the casino.

We've come to the Spielbank, Bad Homburg's casino. Its heart is older than it looks. The core is the Brunnensälchen, the little spring hall, a plain single-storey building put up in 1838 by the Darmstadt architect Georg Moller for the spa guests' social gatherings. Modern extensions have since grown around it. The casino likes to call itself the Mother of Monte Carlo. Here's why. In 1838 Landgrave Ludwig of Hesse-Homburg met two French twins, François and Louis Blanc, in Luxembourg, where they ran a small casino. The brothers had a colourful past. As young bankers in Bordeaux, they had profited on the stock market by learning of price movements in Paris ahead of everyone else, via the state's optical telegraph, after bribing the officials who ran it. Ludwig died early in 1839, but the deal went ahead under his brother and successor, Landgrave Philipp. In July 1840 the Blancs received a thirty-year licence. In return they had to pay a rising rent and build a Kurhaus worth at least one hundred thousand guilders. The casino opened in May 1841, and it changed everything. The Blancs offered roulette with a single zero instead of the usual double zero. That gave players better odds and drew gamblers from all over Europe. The profits paid for the Kurhaus, for street lighting, for the English park, and for the railway to Frankfurt, which opened in 1860. At the tables the language was French, and many of the staff came from French-speaking Friedrichsdorf nearby. The people of Homburg themselves were not allowed to play. That ban on local residents in Hessian casinos was only lifted in 1986. Among the players was Fyodor Dostoevsky, who gambled here from October 1863 and lost far more than he won. His novel The Gambler captures the feverish world of these German spa casinos. Then the tide turned. After Prussia annexed Homburg in 1866, gambling was banned, and when the new German Empire extended the ban, the tables had to close by the end of 1872. François Blanc announced that, to avoid trouble, the casino would not open on the last two days. Play went on regardless, right to the last minute, at eleven at night on New Year's Eve. By then Blanc had already taken over the casino of Monte Carlo, in 1863, and he made it even more successful than Homburg. The following year Homburg's spa guests fell by half. Only in 1949 did the casino reopen here in the Kurpark, and it has called itself the Mother of Monte Carlo ever since. From the casino, let's walk a short way north-west, to a quiet spring where, long before the roulette wheels, Homburg's spa story began.

Step down into this quiet hollow. This is the Ludwigsbrunnen, the oldest spring in the Kurpark and the place where Homburg's career as a spa began. The town itself calls it the most secluded corner of the park. Look at the ring of red sandstone posts joined by cast-iron railings, from the mid-1830s, and opposite the steps, the remains of an old rock grotto. This spring is older than the casino we have just left. In 1809 two boys bathing in the Kirdorfer Bach, close to an old salt spring in these meadows, came across water bubbling out of the ground and tasted it. Sour, they found, but refreshing. One of them, a boy named Weckerling, grew up to be a respected master mason and a major in the town's citizen militia. The ruler who took notice was Landgrave Friedrich the Fifth Ludwig, an unusual prince for his time, a man of letters rather than a soldier. Under him Hölderlin, whom we met earlier, was given his post as court librarian, and it was for him that Hölderlin wrote his great hymn Patmos. Friedrich had the spring enclosed in 1809 and 1810. At first it was simply called the Upper Spring, or the Salt Spring. A double ring of Italian column poplars was planted around it, the same slender tree that Friedrich and his wife Caroline had used along the Tannenwaldallee, their long avenue towards the Taunus, as a symbol of Arcadia. Then came the marketing. From 1810 the water was bottled and sent out in stoneware jugs to make the spring known. None of those jugs is known to survive. But the town museum in the Gothic House keeps a pair of hand-blown glass carafes, engraved Homburg Mineral Water and dated the twenty-eighth of April 1810. One carries the initials F L, for the landgrave, the other a C, for Caroline. The museum thinks they may have been used to serve the couple the fresh water when the spring was inaugurated. Since 1835 it has carried the name Ludwigsbrunnen. The town names it after Friedrich the Fifth Ludwig, though some accounts credit his son, Landgrave Ludwig, who was on the throne by then. The spring lies so close to the surface that it had to be re-enclosed again and again, most recently in 1977. Its water is naturally sparkling, about twelve degrees cool, low in minerals but rich in carbon dioxide, and the town describes it as pleasant to taste. The Elisabethenbrunnen made Homburg famous. But this modest spring came first. From this quiet corner, let's walk west through the park, to the bronze bust of a doctor who changed what many of us eat for breakfast.

Here stands a bronze bust on a base of shell limestone. It honours a Swiss doctor whose name you may know from the breakfast table: Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner, the man behind Bircher muesli. Bircher-Benner was born in Aarau in 1867 and studied medicine in Zurich and Berlin. Even as a student he was drawn to natural healing, water cures and diet. At a time when rich, heavy food was a sign of prosperity, he argued that fresh, uncooked plant food could keep people healthy, and heal them. He coined the German term Vollwertkost, wholefood. In 1904 he opened a sanatorium on the Zürichberg, high above the lake, and called it Lebendige Kraft, Living Strength. Its patients came from across Europe, and among them were writers such as Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse. His most famous recipe was humble: soaked oats, grated apple, nuts and milk. He himself called it the apple diet dish, or in Swiss German simply d'Spys, the dish. It was his patients who called it Birchermüesli, and under that name it went round the world. He liked to tell friends where the idea came from. On a walk in the mountains, he said, he and his wife stopped at an alpine hut, where the dairymaid served them a rather strange meal of crushed grain, fruit, milk and chopped nuts. He even designed his dish to come as close as possible to the composition of mother's milk. So why is he remembered here, in a German spa park? The bust is by the Frankfurt sculptor Georg Krämer and was unveiled in 1965. It was given by the Society for Health Culture, which Bircher-Benner had once chaired. And there is a local thread. In 1953 his son Ralph co-founded the Bircher-Benner publishing house, which carried on the family's health magazine, and its seat was here in Bad Homburg. Read the inscription on the base. It calls him the father of the new science of nutrition. Today the bust is a protected monument. In a town built around healing water and the idea of the cure, a memorial to healthy eating fits rather well. From here, a short walk north brings us to our final stop: a golden pavilion on a small rise, with a royal story to finish our walk.

This is our final stop: the older of the two Thai salas, long known in Homburg as the Siamese Temple, here in the north-west of the Kurpark near the Schwanenteich, the Swan Pond. Before you go closer, notice where it stands. It was placed on a small rise, at a point where the park's main sightlines meet, so that it can be seen from several directions. This is the pavilion that King Chulalongkorn gave Bad Homburg after his cure in 1907, in gratitude for the town's hospitality and for his recovery. It was made in Bangkok and decorated with gold leaf, then taken apart and shipped to Germany in pieces. When the parts arrived in 1910, the damage was serious: two thirds of the glazed roof tiles were broken, and other pieces had been lost on the way. A tile works in the Palatinate made new tiles, and the Munich sculptor Bernhard Halbreiter replaced the damaged and missing carvings. The rebuilding was led by the government architect Peter Danzer, who had once worked on buildings for the king in Bangkok and knew how such a pavilion was put together. The king had wanted his sala to stand over his spring, the one we visited in the salt meadows. But that would have broken Lenné's design for the park, and Kaiser Wilhelm the Second refused. So it was built here instead, as a place of rest and reflection. Chulalongkorn died in 1910 and never saw it finished. On the twenty-second of May 1914, barely two months before the First World War broke out, it was finally inaugurated in the presence of Prince Mahidol of Siam, the king's son. Mahidol was the father of King Bhumibol, the king who gave the second sala in 2007. So the two pavilions are linked by one family across a century. The friendship lasted. Siamese kings came back to Homburg: King Prajadhipok in 1934, and King Bhumibol in 1960. After the war the little building had become shabby, and King Bhumibol had it restored. Every year, on the twenty-third of October, the anniversary of Chulalongkorn's death, the mayor and representatives of Thailand lay wreaths here. This is where our walk ends. From Lenné's lawns to healing springs, a world casino and two Thai gifts, the Kurpark has shown how a spa invents a world. Thank you for joining me. Linger a while under the old trees, or follow the paths back toward the springs and the town.