Jelenia Góra Town Trail · the long route · Cieplice

Marysieńka Spring Museum

Cieplice was healing with water long before anyone could reach deep for it. In 1853 a borehole was sunk here to 167 metres – and so a spring came into being that today bears the name of Queen Marysieńka Sobieska, though for its first hundred years it was called something else entirely. Beside the spring there is now an exhibition about how this town treated the sick over the centuries.

The borehole that changed the scale

Until the middle of the nineteenth century the spa relied on what flowed out of the ground by itself. In 1853 a borehole was sunk to 167 metres, and that was a change in kind: instead of waiting for a natural outflow, people began to reach for the water.

A detail that says something about spa practice: today a well 24.6 metres deep is used, in the upper part of that same borehole. The nineteenth-century investment is thus still working, only shallower than planned.

Why Marysieńka

The present name is not the original one. The borehole was first called “Ludwigs Quelle” – Ludwig's spring. The queen's name appeared after the war and refers to an event more than three hundred years earlier: in 1687 Queen Marysieńka Sobieska stayed in Cieplice with a large court.

It was one of those visits thanks to which Cieplice was heard of beyond Silesia. The same roll of spa guests includes Albrecht Stanisław Radziwiłł, Grand Chancellor of Lithuania, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the Prussian king Frederick William III with his wife, John Quincy Adams, Hugo Kołłątaj, Józef Wybicki and Izabella Czartoryska.

The name given after 1945 picked a Polish queen from that list – and it would be hard to find a plainer example of how post-war naming looked for Polish footholds in a German town.

The stag that took a bath

Before anyone drilled, there was a legend – and by a spring it is worth recalling, because it explains half the city.

In 1175 Duke Bolesław the Tall was hunting in the surrounding forests and wounded a stag. The animal fled, and the duke came upon it later by a warm spring, where – thanks to that water – it had recovered its strength. In memory of the event he is said to have raised a chapel of Saint John the Baptist on the spot, the predecessor of the church standing a few dozen metres from here.

Note who the hero of this story is. A stag – the same animal that entered the coat of arms of Jelenia Góra and that stands in the city today as twenty-nine little deer. The legend of the discovery of the Cieplice waters and the name of the city grow from the same root.

Who drank this water before the borehole

The first certain mention of Cieplice comes from 1261: in a document Duke Bolesław the Bald, called Rogatka, granted Cieplice to the Augustinians. Twenty years later they were replaced by the Knights Hospitaller, brought in by Duke Bernard of Lwówek, and in 1403 Gotsche II Schoff – the progenitor of the Schaffgotsch family – brought the Cistercians here from Krzeszów.

All these orders have one thing in common: they used these waters for healing. The cure in Cieplice is therefore older than every building you pass on this trail – older than the Long House, than the palace, than either church.

A formal curiosity at the end: Cieplice received the status of a spa only in 1975. Eight hundred years of practice, and only then the paperwork.

The hottest water in Poland

It is worth knowing why anyone drilled at all. The thermal waters of Cieplice are the hottest in Poland: in shallow intakes they reach 37 °C, and in deep boreholes up to 87 °C.

They are at the same time weakly mineralised but rich in fluorine and silica – and it was that composition, not the temperature alone, that built the spa's reputation. Marysieńka is one of thirteen intakes in use in Cieplice.

This set of figures explains the rest of the trail: the monastery, the palace, the house for the abbots, the theatre and the park all grew around something that flows out from under the ground.

The exhibition: how they treated people here

By the spring there is the “Marysieńka Spring” Historical Exhibition, devoted to the history of spa treatment in Cieplice. It has exhibits and display boards, you can watch a documentary film about the history of the spa, and above all see the spring itself – which in practice means you are looking at a working intake, not a model.

The site was revitalised, and the exhibition and the film were prepared with the help of an EU grant. The exhibition is open to visitors; details are best checked on the spot.

Three trail points within a hundred metres

The exhibition stands in the courtyard of the Long House, in the same publicly accessible space from which you can see the Natural History Museum in the former monastery. It is the densest stretch of the whole trail: the oldest secular building of the spa, the natural history collections and the spring – all within sight.

If you have an hour in Cieplice, this is where to spend it: the courtyard, the exhibition, the museum, and on the way the church of St John the Baptist and the palace.