Baden-Baden

The Romans knew the hot springs as Aquae, and later as Aurelia Aquensis; the ruins of a Roman bath from the reign of Caracalla, who came to ease his arthritis, were found below the New Castle in 1847. By 1112 the town was the seat of the margraves of Baden, who lived in the hilltop castle of Hohenbaden until Christopher I moved down to the New Castle in 1479. When the margraviate was divided in 1535, the town became capital of the Margraviate of Baden-Baden. Witch trials in 1627–31 produced hundreds of verdicts, French troops plundered the town in the Thirty Years' War and burned it in 1689, and in 1706 Margrave Louis William moved his court to Rastatt.

Recovery came with refugees from the French Revolution and the visit of the Prussian queen in the early 19th century. The Grand Duchy of Baden subsidised the resort, and with the Kurhaus, the casino, the Trinkhalle of 1842, horse racing and the Lichtentaler Allee, the town became a meeting place for nobility and wealthy families. Under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s it was called Europe's summer capital, and its population of about 10,000 could quadruple in the season. Queen Victoria, Wilhelm I and Berlioz visited, and Dostoyevsky gambled here while writing The Gambler.

The town took its double name formally in 1931. About 3 per cent of its houses were destroyed in the Second World War, a third of the Oos district among them in December 1944. Afterwards it became the headquarters of the French occupation forces and of the Südwestfunk broadcaster, now part of SWR. The Olympic Congress met in the Kurhaus in 1981, the Festspielhaus opened in 1998, and in 2021 the town joined the Great Spa Towns of Europe World Heritage Site.

Baden-Baden presents itself as a town of baths, media, art and international festivals. Bathing culture comes first: 29 springs rise at between 46 and 67°C, and their salty water is piped from deep under the Florentine Hill to the Friedrichsbad and the Caracalla baths. The Trinkhalle, where the waters were drunk, and the Kurhaus with its casino recall the 19th-century resort.

Music has deep roots here. Johannes Brahms spent his summers in Lichtental from 1865 to 1876, Clara Schumann lived in the town, and a bust of Clara Schumann stands in the dahlia garden at the end of the Lichtentaler Allee. The Festspielhaus, built behind the old railway station, is the largest opera and concert house in Germany and the first in Europe to be privately financed, and the theatre, completed in 1861, is a playhouse with its own company. Literature remembers the town through Turgenev's Smoke and Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, and museums along the Allee and in the town show modern art and Fabergé.

The town's other passion is horse racing, held at nearby Iffezheim since 1858, with the Grosser Preis von Baden in early September among the most important races in Germany. The German Media Prize has been awarded here since 1992.

About 57,000 people lived in the town at the end of 2025, making it the smallest urban district in Baden-Württemberg. Its eleven districts range from the spa centre to the residential valleys of Lichtental and Oos and the villages of Steinbach, Neuweier and Varnhalt on the edge of the Rhine plain.

The economy rests on health, tourism and culture — the spas, clinics, hotels, casino, festival hall and conference trade — and on the media: the Südwestfunk, now part of the regional public broadcaster SWR, has been based here since the war. The town's wealth shows in its villas and gardens. The nearby airport and the motorway link it to Karlsruhe, Strasbourg and the wider Upper Rhine.

Life is quiet and green, with forest reaching down to the edge of the town and paths leading up from the Oos valley into the hills. Less than half the population now belongs to the two main churches, and the town has been governed since 2022 by an independent mayor.

Baden-Baden eats in the style of Baden, which leans towards neighbouring France. Flammkuchen, a speciality shared with Alsace and Baden, is bread dough rolled very thin, spread with fromage blanc or crème fraîche, topped with sliced onions and lardons and baked in a wood-fired oven. From the Black Forest come Schwarzwälder Schinken, a dry-cured smoked ham protected in the European Union since 1997, and the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, a layer cake of cocoa, cherries, Kirsch and whipped cream decorated with dark chocolate, served in the cafés of the spa district.

The town lies in the historical region of Baden, which gives its name to Germany's third-largest wine region, where cooperatives make most of the wine. The local wine taverns and the inns of the old town pour Baden wines alongside regional dishes.

The coffee and cake of the afternoon remain a resort ritual, taken on terraces near the Kurhaus or along the Lichtentaler Allee after a bath.