The parks and gardens raise awareness of nature and stimulate the imagination. They are also an integral part of the life of a spa-goer. They are essential components of a culture of therapy in the spa resorts. Thermal spa towns have formed near springs, which are the origin of their contemporary rural and urban landscape. They were sacred sites, as far back as the Celts and the Romans, on top of which Christianity situated places of miracles.

 

Similar landscape-based and mythical origins can be found for practically all the historic thermal towns. However, it was from the 18th Century onwards that the now-urbanised meadows and fields surrounding the springs, the thermal establishments and leisure areas gave way to the arrangement of parks and social promenades.

 

The promenade de sept heures and promenade de quatre heures (7 o'clock and 4 o'clock promenades), which hint at the rythmic precision of a curist's life between the cure and social life, became open-air theatres, which were soon replaced with an English landscape park designed by William Hansen in the late 19th Century. Vichy is a park-town, offering more than a hundred acres of spaces grandiosely produced in the Second Empire. Bath's urban parks highlight the magnificent architecture harking back to the Georgian era, when the Royal Crescent opened onto a meadow which provided a visual link to the surrounding hills.

 

The Lichtentaler Allee in Baden-Baden slowly peels away from the theatres and museums to become a park which plays on its division between peace and intense delight along the river. All the spa towns appealed to the great architects. For Kurpark, Bad Hombourg employed the famous Potsdam and Berlin landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné, while in the grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Frenchman Edouard André was invited to not only reshape a large part of capital city's town planning, but to lend his experience in landscaping to the park in Mondorf les Bains. These designers, who left their mark on the interpretation of space, knew full well that a garden was a representation of the self, and above all one of the most auspicious locations for collective representation, and public.