Jelenia Góra Town Trail · the long route · Cieplice

Graduation tower

On a route full of buildings several centuries old, this point is barely a few years old. The brine graduation tower above the Kamienna was built together with the riverside boulevard opened on 19 November 2019. There is nothing to tour here in the usual sense – at a graduation tower you sit down and breathe. Which is exactly why it is worth passing slowly instead of ticking off.

The youngest point of the trail

The church of St John the Baptist goes back to the twelfth century, the Long House probably to the thirteenth, the palace has stood since the 1780s. The graduation tower is centuries younger, and that is not a complaint but information about what Cieplice is today: a spa that is still being extended.

The structure also shows how the understanding of a cure has changed. For eight hundred years it was about water – to bathe in it or to drink it. A graduation tower serves neither purpose. It serves for breathing.

How a graduation tower works

The principle is simple and old. Brine trickles down a wall packed with brushwood – in Polish towers usually blackthorn – and the wind and sun evaporate the water from it. The salt and the elements it carried stay in the air as a fine aerosol. Standing beside it you breathe something close to sea air, only over a few dozen metres instead of on a beach.

That is why benches are set by graduation towers: it is a structure where it is best to sit for a quarter of an hour rather than look at it.

Graduation towers were built for salt, not for health

It is worth knowing that the structure you are sitting beside has an industrial pedigree.

The oldest and largest in Europe stand in Ciechocinek and were built in 1824–1859 as part of a salt works. Their task was to concentrate brine: water trickled down the brushwood, part of it evaporated, and what remained was concentrated enough to make boiling salt worthwhile.

The healthy aerosol people come for today was then a side effect. Workers at the salt works simply had fewer problems with their airways than everyone else – and only from that observation was a spa service made.

The Cieplice tower is therefore a descendant of an industrial device, moved into a park and stripped of its original task. It is meant to do exactly what used to be a by-product of production.

The boulevard, or why this was built at all

The tower did not appear on its own – it is part of the Boulevard on the Kamienna, and the boulevard project explains why it stands here.

The works covered walkways with access for people with disabilities from ul. Cieplicka and ul. Piotra Ściegiennego, the installation of the twenty-metre tower, steps linking the boulevard with the former monastery complex, lighting, street furniture and planting.

Note those steps. The boulevard ties the riverbank to the old monastery, that is, to the Natural History Museum and the church of St John the Baptist. This is not an attraction added by the water but a connection between points of the trail that used to be separated by a slope.

The partners of the investment confirm as much: the parish of St John the Baptist in Cieplice and the Cieplice spa company. Two other points on the same route.

What it cost

The whole boulevard with the tower cost 2.2 million złoty, of which 85 per cent was a European Union grant – from the Regional Operational Programme of Lower Silesia. The work was done by a consortium of the firms Filigran, Tektonike and AXYO.

I give these figures not for the record but because they say something about the spa today: the youngest point of the trail was built with EU money, like most of the tourist infrastructure in this part of the Karkonosze.

What is still meant to be built here

In 2022 the city announced a tender for a palm house in the Spa Park together with four brine graduation towers. The palm house is to be a spa passage under a barrel-vaulted glass roof: 58 metres long, 11 to 16 metres wide, almost 11 metres high, about 761 square metres in area, planted mainly with Mediterranean species. The four new towers are to be wooden, each just under five metres high.

As of August 2026 none of it stands yet. I write about it because the plan is public and worth noting – but plainly as a plan. If the palm house were built, it would be the biggest new attraction in Cieplice for years.

What you can do here

Sit down. It sounds banal, but it is the only sensible set of instructions for a graduation tower: a quarter of an hour within reach of the aerosol does more than five minutes of taking photographs.

The boulevard also suits a break halfway along the route – it is right by the river, it has benches and lighting, and the steps take you straight up into the old monastery. If you are walking the trail from Plac Piastowski, this is the natural place to rest before the rest of it.