Meskó Csaba: Thermal Baths - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)

43^140C; all this including twenty sweating chambers and twenty-four changing cubicles; a 360-square-metre mineral swimming bath for women with eighty richly appointed dressing chambers and a showering room.

Here the authors remark that “the whole of Europe has nothing to match this pool, deservedly the pride of the Császár Baths, in terms of its size, the efficiency of its furnishings, and the elegance of its entire appearance”. With a surface of 1,860 square metres, the men’s swimming bath is a truly enormous mineral pool, “the largest mineral swimming pool on the continent”, with 120 changing cubicles, gymnastic appliances, and diving platforms.

Besides these facilities, there were twenty-two mirror baths, elegant tub baths (at 37-40°C) with separate antechambers, eighteen Turkish baths (at 27.5°C), eight porcelain, seven white and twenty-eight red marble baths, twenty zinc tub baths, all filled with mineral water at natural temperatures from medicinal springs.

In 1926, a sports swimming pool was added to the baths. The Császár Baths was taken over by ORFi in 1965. In the first half of 1981, the Turkish bath was restored to its original condition, to which a new three-hundred-bed sanatorium was added.

The composition and indications of the medicinal waters are the same as those of the Lukács Baths.

Széchenyi medicinal baths 11 Állatkerti körút, District XIV

The Széchenyi Baths is one of the largest bathing complexes in Europe. Its spacious, well-lit pool halls are evocative of the bathing culture of Roman times, the tub baths are reminiscent of ancient Greece, while the sweating chambers, cold-water immersion pools and saunas conjure up the spirit of the north.

The predecessor of the baths was the Artézi fürdő (Artesian Bath) which opened its doors in June 1881 on Nádorsziget (Nádor Island) in the City Park. Its water was supplied by well No. I situated under the statue of Prince Árpád in Heroes’ Square, drilled by the mining engineer Vilmos Zsigmondy.

We learn the following about the Artézi fürdő from Ger- lóczy and Hankó’s work:

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