For the farmers in the Alps, the prestigious bathing resorts of Europe were once inaccessible, but they did not have to do without the blessing of the healing water. All over the mountains there used to be simple bathing establishments, mostly huts made of raw tree trunks, built in places where mineral or hot springs gushed. The Romans already knew the effect of this water, which was enriched with health-promoting substances thanks to the slow seepage in the stony ground. In the Alps, the legionaries preferred to set up camp where they could use thermal springs. The peasant baths were later built at the springs and operated well into the twentieth century. When the outhouses in the country were replaced by modern wet cells, they disappeared one after the other.Only one thing survived in East Tyrol: the Aigner Badl in Abfaltersbach.
The Badl is an ensemble of clapboard-roofed log huts with a snack station on a slope above the valley floor, through which the Drava meanders. A few hundred people live in Abfaltersbach, two Gothic church towers scratch the sky. There are no hotels, but a lot of forest and meadows where cows graze. “Duck your head! Centuries ago people were smaller, ”says Brigitte as she walks up a wooden staircase to the bath room, pointing with her hand to a beam wrapped with foam rubber mats. Brigitte runs the bathroom together with her daughter Anna, who married a son of the Aigner family; she has owned the establishment for almost time. The weather-blackened wooden beams from which the bathroom was built are two hundred and fifty years old. At the beginning of the nineties it threatened to deterioratewas renovated in good time and is now a listed building.
Bowling and shooting as a pastime
“I am the girl for everything,” says Brigitte. The senior manager uses a bristle brush to clean the larch tubs that stand on wooden blocks in the low chambers. Brigitte has actually long since retired, "but how else should this work here?" There are people who have hygienic concerns about the larch wood, and it's true, there are no shiny chrome baths here. "Larch wood is much cleaner than plastic, for example," says the boss, reassuringly, that it has been scientifically proven that the wood excretes a bacteria-killing resin. “In the end, it's a matter of the head,” says Brigitte, adding with a resolute tone that soaps and shampoos are just as forbidden in the bathroom as cleaning agents. "Brushing and washing - both thoroughly." Brigitte also takes care of the calcium sulfate mineral source,which gushes out of the slope a hundred meters above the Badlhütte. Every spring, before operations can start, the surrounds must be cleaned of sulfur deposits as well as sand and gravel, as required by the state health office.