In the early part of the year, Jane and I are tempted to flee Britain for somewhere warmer. But even on the Mediterranean you can’t be certain of feeling hot. And neither of us enjoys flying for 10 hours or so to a tropical destination. Where you are guaranteed heat - and much closer to home - is when standing up to your neck in 38 degrees of thermal water in one of the great European spas.

Budapest is well worth visiting; indeed, we have been there twice in the last four years, staying in the marvellous Hotel Gellert with its beautiful pools, saunas and steam rooms, all freely available to hotel guests.

This year, however, I felt like going somewhere where I can actually speak the language. And a reader’s tip in the Guardian Travel section put me on to Baden Baden, in south-west Germany.

Now many places which include the words Terme, Spa, Bad (or, indeed, ‘Bath’) in the name may well have catered magnificently for the needs of heat-seeking visitors in the past.  But don’t assume that this will still be the case.  Baden Baden, however, is exactly what it says on the label: an elegant spa town of some 50,000 inhabitants, a good portion of whom seem to be employed in keeping the various bathing places clean.

The most beautiful of these is the Friedrichsbad, opened in 1877 in an attempt to give users a feel of the way rich Romans spent their free time.

But, for some reason, you have to follow a certain routine in the Friedrichsbad, so we decided to go to the Caracalla Therme, a few minutes walk away, where you can buy a ticket for a specified number of hours, spending them as you will. (Here’s one for a two-hour visit, costing 14 euros if you buy it at the baths, with a 2 euro reduction if you get it from the tourist office, using a pass issued by your hotel).

Downstairs at the Caracalla there’s a range of pools and saunas, and you can slip easily from inside to outside.

Upstairs you enter the Textilfreier Bereich, or ‘clothes-free area’ (for the French, less coyly, the sign says réservé au nudisme,) where people look at you rather sternly if you don’t immediately strip off your bathers on passing through the door.

The dress code is a little flexible, however.  You need to take a towel with you, since sitting naked on the hot wooden slats of a sauna is decidedly uncomfortable, as well as unhygienic. And many people, as they walk around, use their towel as a fig-leaf.  Some women, indeed, use a pair of towels, one knotted round the waist, the other round the shoulders.

But mostly it is pretty free and easy, with total nudism even usual in the communal toilet areas, where urinals - understandably - are not available.

We found that a two-hour session a day was plenty, which gave us time to wander round the town or up in the surrounding hills.

This is the ‘Trinkhalle’,

where the Tourist

Office is found. There’s

a nice quiet cafe/bar,

with a rack of news-

papers, including the

Times and FT. And

you can still drink

some of the warm

spa water.

Much of the town would still be familiar to people who knew it in its heyday, during the 19th century, as in the print above.

One of these was the composer Hector Berlioz, who visited Baden Baden nine times in the decade from 1853-1863, earning a tidy sum giving just a few recitals.  A plaque on the main theatre (below) shows that, in August 1862,  the grand opening featured the premiere of his new, specially commissioned opera Béatrice et Bénédict.   

In this same decade the Russian writer Dostoyevsky visited the town, spending more time compulsively gambling in the casino than

writing.  At least his novel The Gambler came out of his experiences, and it is clear that he set it in Baden Baden, though the town is not actually named.

Our landlord, Gerhardt, took me for a drive one afternoon up the hill behind the theatre and casino, and the ancient houses, some truly enormous, made me think of the ‘Quintas’ you find in the Portuguese town of Sintra, where the court and nobility would retreat from the heat of the capital in the summer.  Here are photos of a couple of them.

Gerhardt and his wife Natalie run the Gästehaus Bühnen in the centre of town just off the Augustaplatz.  We booked a clean, neat  apartment, with a fully equipped kitchen for 90 euros a night, and would have had a discount if we had emailed them at nb2002de@yahoo.de rather than going via a hotel reservation website.

Of course you don’t need a kitchen in a German town. But German portions tend to be so huge that it is a relief to be able to cater for yourself.  In fact we only ate out on the first of the five evenings we  spent in Baden Baden, so bloated did the goose-centred meal we had in a Czech restaurant make us feel. 

It’s easy to buy good, fresh ingredients to cook yourself.  There are four outside markets a week in different parts of town (the Friday one actually on the Augustaplatz). And there are some excellent places for takeaway food, notably the NordSee shop (part of a well-known chain) in the Gernsbacherstrasse, which specialises in sea-food.  You can either take one or more of their ready-made platters or ask for a bit of this and a bit of that. 

In the same street (which, incidentally, runs up to the Caracalla Therme) you can find other, more meaty takeaway places.  I couldn’t leave Germany without having had a sausage, and we found some where which serves excellent Bratwurst in a bun with mustard and a side order of sauerkraut, very reasonably priced, nicely wrapped and still piping hot when we got back to the Gastehaus with our bottles of beer.    Macdonalds, eat your heart out!

     (By the way, do not confuse Baden Baden with Baden Powell).