Discover Bath

A Roman spa wrapped in a Georgian city

Bath exists because of water: 1,170,000 litres (240,000 gallons) a day rising at 46 degrees Celsius from the Sacred Spring, one of three hot springs here and the only ones in Britain. The Romans knew the place as Aquae Sulis and built a temple and bathing complex around the sacred spring in the first century AD; the medieval city grew over it, and the Georgians rebuilt the whole town in local honey-coloured limestone as the most fashionable resort in 18th-century England. The result is the set of showpieces the city is known for: the Royal Crescent's sweep of thirty houses above its lawn, the Circus's perfect ring, Great Pulteney Street running arrow-straight to the Holburne Museum, and Robert Adam's Pulteney Bridge lined with shops above the horseshoe weir on the Avon.

UNESCO listed the entire city as a World Heritage Site in 1987, and added it again in 2021 as one of the eleven Great Spa Towns of Europe, a double listing very few places hold. But Bath is a working city of around 90,000 people, not a museum: rugby at the Rec on winter Saturdays, students up the hill at two universities, the farmers' market every Saturday in a Victorian railway station, and locals in Widcombe, Walcot, Bear Flat and Larkhall who mostly leave the Abbey courtyard to the visitors and take their own city in from the Skyline path above it.