Spa

Spa is a town in a valley in the Ardennes, in Liège province, about 35 kilometres south-east of Liège and 45 south-west of Aachen, with a population of 10,543 in 2006. Its name became the common noun: the mineral springs here gave English the word for every curative bath since. The water is still bottled and exported worldwide. It is one of Belgium’s most visited towns, and the wooded hills around it carry the walking that the nineteenth-century visitors came for as much as the baths. Autumn is the season, when the beech turns across the whole valley.