Grand Resort Bad Ragaz

The oldest continuous story in this guide. In 1242 hunters from Pfäfers monastery found a spring in the Tamina Gorge running at 36.5°C — body temperature — and Benedictine monks began treating people with it. Early bathers were lowered into the gorge on ropes. Paracelsus wrote about the water in the sixteenth century. In 1840 it was piped four kilometres to Ragaz, and in 1872 the Tamina Therme became Europe's first indoor thermal pool. Rilke, Nietzsche, Thomas Mann and Victor Hugo all came.

That water still arrives at exactly 36.5°C and remains the reason the place exists. The spa runs to some 12,800 square metres across the resort's own thermal areas and the Tamina Therme, with sixteen pools and the nineteenth-century Helena Bath among them.

The medical side is substantial and recently expanded: a medical health centre with more than seventy doctors and therapists, and the Tamina Health Centre opened in October 2025 around prevention and longevity, with diagnostic assessment followed by a personalised plan and optional follow-up coaching after departure.

What to be clear about is the format. This is a resort — two five-star hotels, a third property, two golf courses, families welcome — with a serious medical centre inside it, not a clinic with rooms attached. Guests wanting the enclosed discipline of Lanserhof or Buchinger will find it too open, too social and too easy to opt out of.

Which is also its argument. Almost eight hundred years of continuous therapeutic use, and you can bring your family.