Abano Terme
Learn about Abano Terme
A concise introduction to Abano Terme, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Abano Terme is a thermal spa town at the foot of the Euganean Hills, ten kilometres south-west of Padua, and it is one of the largest concentrations of thermal treatment in Europe -- around a hundred hotels, almost all of them with their own thermal pools and mud-treatment departments.
The water is the point. It falls as rain on the pre-Alps, travels underground for some 80 kilometres over roughly twenty-five years, and surfaces here at about 87 degrees, heavily mineralised.
What Abano does with it is fangoterapia -- mud matured in the thermal water until specific micro-organisms colonise it, a preparation regulated and certified in its own right. This is a medical town as much as a holiday one, and it has been in the business since the Romans.