Tamina Gorge

The Tamina has cut a gorge so tight that in places the rock walls lean together far above and daylight arrives as a strip. At the far end a thermal spring emerges at around thirty-six degrees, and its exploitation is the reason anything is here: from the medieval period patients were lowered into the gorge on ropes to bathe at the source, an ordeal recorded with some horror by visitors, until the Altes Bad Pfafers was built in the seventeenth century at the gorge mouth to house them properly. The water is still piped to the spas at Bad Ragaz. The bath house is now a museum, and a gallery cut along the rock leads to the spring chamber. Paracelsus wrote about the waters in the 1530s.

What you actually see

• Walls that nearly meet overhead - daylight reduced to a strip.
• A 36-degree spring at the source - the water that built Bad Ragaz.
• The Altes Bad Pfafers - the seventeenth-century bath house, now a museum.
• The rope-lowered patients' story - how the spring was used before the building.

When to go

May to October. Half a day.

Honest expectations

Closed through winter. The gorge is cold, dark and damp even in summer - it holds little sun. The gallery is narrow with a low ceiling in places. There is no bathing in the gorge; the spas are down in Bad Ragaz and priced accordingly.

Nearby

Bad Ragaz and its spas are below; Pizol and the five-lake walk are above.