The Water That Built a Country
The first time I stood in the mineral baths at Bankya, a small town pressed against the western edge of Sofia, the water was 36 degrees and smelled faintly of sulfur and iron. An elderly man next to me - he must have been in his eighties - filled a plastic jug from the public tap, the same mineral water piped directly from the spring, and told me he had been coming every day for forty years. Not for wellness. Not for optimization. Because this is what you do.
Bulgaria has over 500 documented mineral springs. The water temperature ranges from tepid to scalding. The mineral content varies wildly - iron-rich in Devin, sulfurous in Kyustendil, mildly radioactive in Momin Prohod. The Thracians bathed in these springs before the Romans arrived and built their own elaborate bathhouses on top. When the Ottomans came, they built hammams. When the communists came, they built sanatoriums. The springs themselves never changed. They are older than every empire that has tried to claim them.
A Culture That Doesn’t Market Itself
What makes Bulgarian thermal culture remarkable is not the springs themselves - Iceland, Hungary, Japan, and New Zealand all have geothermal abundance. It is the sheer ordinariness of it. In Velingrad, a town in the Rhodope Mountains that calls itself the “spa capital of the Balkans,” locals collect mineral water from public fountains in recycled soda bottles. There are no influencers. There are no branded experiences. There is a concrete pool fed by a pipe from the mountain, and there are people in it at six in the morning because that is the best time for their joints.
This is thermal culture at its most unself-conscious. In Sofia, the Central Mineral Baths - an extraordinary Ottoman-revival building completed in 1913 - sat empty for decades while the city argued about what to do with it. Meanwhile, outside the building, people lined up at the public mineral water taps, filling containers. The water kept flowing whether the politics resolved or not.
What the Water Does
Bulgarian balneology - the medical study of therapeutic bathing - was a serious discipline during the socialist period. Sanatoriums across the country prescribed specific springs for specific conditions: Hisarya for kidney disorders, Sandanski for respiratory illness, Pavel Banya for musculoskeletal problems. The science was real, if sometimes overstated.
Modern research on mineral spring bathing is limited but suggestive. Sulfur-rich waters have demonstrated anti-inflammatory properties in small clinical studies. Thermal bathing in mineral water shows consistent effects on perceived pain reduction in osteoarthritis patients. The mineral content appears to matter - it is not just the heat.
What the research has not captured, and probably cannot, is the cumulative effect of a culture that bathes together, regularly, across generations. The Bulgarian banya is not a treatment. It is a habit with deep social roots, and the health outcomes are likely inseparable from the communal regularity of the practice.
Finding the Springs
Bulgaria’s mineral springs are not hidden, but they are not curated for tourists either. You will not find most of them on wellness travel lists. That is part of their appeal.
Start in Velingrad if you want variety - the town has dozens of springs at different temperatures and mineral compositions, some in renovated spa hotels, others in open-air pools that locals have used for generations. Devin, deeper in the Rhodopes, is quieter and known for exceptionally clean iron-rich water. Sapareva Banya, near the Rila Mountains, has the only geyser on the Balkan Peninsula, with water emerging at 103 degrees Celsius.
For the full experience, skip the hotel spas and find the public mineral baths. The infrastructure is sometimes rough. The water is always extraordinary. And the eighty-year-old man with the plastic jug will probably still be there, doing exactly what his parents did, in water that has been flowing since before anyone thought to write it down.