What does the water at Herculane taste like?

The ancient resort was called Ad Aquas Herculis Sacras Ad Mediam — “at the sacred waters of Hercules, near Mehadia”. A full bathing cult grew around the hot springs of the Cerna, under the protection of Hercules, Aesculapius, and Hygieia: temples, baths, altars, and statues. Aqueducts, baths, coins, and six statues of Hercules survive from the Roman period.

The resort is first documented in the year 153: a votive tablet raised by a delegation of Romans returned unharmed, dedicated to the gods and divinities of the waters. Other tablets praise the healing power of the springs; several are kept today at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. The local inscriptions are collected in the corpora as CIL III 1563–1565.

After the Roman administration withdrew under Aurelian, the baths declined, but the name survived — a sign the water was never abandoned. When the Austrians surveyed the ruins in 1774, the Roman thermae could still be read in the stone.

What did the water taste like to a Roman? No ancient recipe survives, and the only Roman “analysis” is gratitude: the votive tablets speak of healing, not milligrams. But the geology never changed the recipe — the springs rise from the same limestones, along the same faults — so today’s glass is the closest approximation of that glass.

In 1718 the Banat entered the Austrian Empire, and from 1736 General Andreas Hamilton, the provincial governor, rebuilt the baths and recorded the thermae of Hercules, Hygieia, and Aesculapius. The Banat border guards then raised, one after another, the buildings that give the resort its face today: the Neptune and Diana baths, the casino ensemble, Hercules Square, the Traian and Decebal hotels, the stone and cast-iron bridges over the Cerna, the statues, the pavilions, and the station — an Austrian Baroque found nowhere else in Europe.

The Hercules statue in the central square was cast in bronze in 1847 by the Viennese founders Ramelmayer and Glantz. In 1852 Emperor Franz Joseph called Herculane “the most beautiful resort on the continent”, and Empress Elisabeth filled pages of her private journal with it.

Figures are missing from the imperial century, though: hydrochemical data on the springs had been published since the 17th century, but systematic records begin only in the early 20th. The 19th century left the buildings and a classification of the waters by the senses: warm, sulphurous, salty. Only the modern laboratory would put milligrams on each taste.

Herculane water is of the sodium–chloride type: dissolved table salt, accompanied by sulphur and calcium. From north to south, temperature, mineralisation, and sulphur rise together — the southern springs are the hottest, saltiest, and most sulphurous. Geothermometers show the water sinks so deep it reaches 170–190 degrees before rising to the surface.

The most unsteady is the Hercules spring, with the highest flow: its temperature jumps between 17 and 53 degrees, depending on how much cold water mixes in along the way.

The threshold at which a water counts as sulphurous is one milligram of hydrogen sulphide per litre. Neptun II holds, at the median, 54 times more — hence the rotten-egg smell that greets the visitor. And Decebal, though lukewarm, is the saltiest: over four and a half grams of chlorides per litre.

The Neptune baths, the imperial pearl of the resort, stand abandoned today: after 1989, privatisations, lawsuits, and tangled property deeds blocked any publicly funded rescue. A collective of young architects, HerculaneProject, documented the building and prepared emergency works to make it safe.

Above the historic centre rise the concrete hotels of the communist era — eight- to twelve-storey blocks built for the mass tourism of employees and pensioners on state treatment vouchers. They still dominate the resort skyline.

Signs of life are not missing: the baths at the Roman Hotel, built over the ancient thermae, reopened in 1999, and recent years have brought private hotels, guesthouses, and villas. Herculane belongs to the European network of Roman thermal spas — the only member in Romania. The water, meanwhile, leaves the ground as it did two thousand years ago.