SPOT HOT

1. Geführter Stadtrundgang

More than 25,000 years ago, people were already making use of Wiesbaden’s thermal springs — yet only over the past eighty years have they been gradually sealed and removed from public awareness. A guided walk through the Historic Pentagon uncovers the now invisible sites of the thermal waters and recounts the bubbling history of the former world spa city: beneath manhole covers, within Roman baths and medieval bathhouses, and behind the façades of grand spa hotels once inhabited by the international crème de la crème.

The walk opens up a new reading of Wiesbaden’s now largely invisible urban DNA. It invites participants to rediscover thermal water as a living, identity-forming element and to reinscribe it into the design of public space as both a healing and a geothermal resource. After eighty years of collective forgetting, the project is above all an act of active, democratic remembrance: contemporary witnesses are called upon to enrich the city’s water history through personal memories, historical photographs, and archival documents.

Yvonne Kirchdorfer is a communications scientist, freelance author, project developer, and co-founder of the feuilleton magazine for art and culture in Wiesbaden, among other things. In 2024, she received the “Golden Lily” for volunteer work in schools and the “Special Prize for Democracy” from the city of Wiesbaden.

Meeting point: Werkraum WDC, Langgasse 5-9 (entrance to the former Sportscheck store), Historisches Fünfeck / Quellenviertel Wiesbaden, free event in German
Repeat on 29 August 2026, 14:00 – 16:00