TRAVELING IN STYLE : TAKING THE WATERS : In Belgium, Visitors to the Original Spa Find Themselves Immersed in a World of Romantic Landscapes, Miraculous Springs and the Ghosts of Czars

The word spa has become a familiar part of our vocabulary. We join health spas to keep in shape. Chefs tempt us with spa cuisine--diet food with class. Woolworth’s even sells a “home spa” foot bath.

The original Spa, though--with a capital S--is an entire town, handsome and diminutive, in the spring-soaked hills of the picturesque Ardennes Mountains in eastern Belgium. This Spa, from which our word derives, is an easy day trip from Brussels, modern enough to have instant cash machines but old-fashioned enough to preserve its heritage of ornate Beaux-Arts buildings. Spa offers even casual visitors a revitalizing taste of long ago in an atmosphere where distinctions between past and present flow sweetly together.

I love spa towns in general and try to visit them whenever I’m in Europe--Marienbad, Baden-Baden, Montecatini, Curia, Bath. They’re an anomaly of time-lapsed urbanity and provincialism combined--grandiose architecture crammed into rural villages. They’re strange places, steeped in history, slightly down-at-the-heel fun cities to which imperial courts and cultural celebrities once flocked. (Many are as famous for their casinos as for their baths.) In spa towns, you can always expect extraordinary grand hotels, vast landscaped parks laced with romantic paths leading deep into the countryside and exotic pavilions housing elaborate curative facilities.

Spa itself is no exception. Entering Spa by way of narrow, twisting roads on my first visit to the place several years ago, I was suddenly stunned by the operatic grandeur of the two main buildings on the central square, the mid-18th Century-Casino (rebuilt in 1921 after a fire) and the 19th-Century Beaux-Arts style Les Thermes de Spa (the Thermal Baths of Spa). Posting myself at a cafe across the street to observe the scene for a few minutes, I ordered a glass of elixir de Spa --a too-potent mix, for 11 a.m., of herbs and liqueur--and watched a steady trickle of visitors and serious curistes (invariably elderly) mount the sculpted grand stairway to Les Thermes for their morning treatment of baths, massages, showers and other therapies. I can only describe their pace as a dreamy bustle.

Later, suitably fortified by my elixir, I climbed the stairs myself. The years have burnished, not blemished, Les Thermes. At the entrance, gilded, frescoed domes soar overhead. In musical descent, two springs--one named for Queen Marie-Henriette of Belgium, who died in Spa in 1902 (her former residence is now the Spa Museum)--burble down from the bronze lips of Art Nouveau masks and stain the white marble walls rust-red. Both maintain a natural temperature of 34 C (about 93 F) and both are naturally carbonated, though one has a higher mineral content than the other. Some spa towns stink of sulfur; Spa’s waters are famous for a less odoriferous element, iron. Still, when I held my glass under the iron-rich source, the water’s aroma was unmistakable--and I held my nose while swallowing it.

There are 52 private bathing cabins in Les Thermes, each furnished with an old-fashioned wooden chaise-longue and decorated with an elaborate neoclassical tile motif in violet, pistachio, blue or peach. At the center of each stands a radiant double-lined copper bath, its curves so deep one can easily imagine losing one’s inhibitions in its embrace. Here, both carbo-gaseous baths (imagine being submerged in a tub of champagne) and full-immersion mud baths are taken. Elsewhere, there are facilities for high-pressure showers (something like being doused by a fire hose), circular showers (spraying out jets of water from all sides) and subaquatic massages--these last on a bed partially submerged in carbonated water--among other treatments. Visitors can avail themselves of any of these on a space-available, pay-as-you-go basis.

Long before Les Thermes was built, though, and long before the miscellaneous specific mechanisms of “thermal cure” were devised by European doctors, Spa was famous simply for the waters that gushed out of the ground--without benefit of ornate architecture or copper tubs. In fact, there are about 30 different springs or pouhons (the old local name) in Spa and its environs, a few in the town itself and the rest in the gentle mountains overlooking it. Around some of these springs, restaurants, recreational facilities and an occasional small hotel have been installed over the years, but the principal allure here is simply the water itself, usually available for bathing and drinking.

If our word spa comes from Spa, the town’s name in turn derives from the Latin verb spargere , “to pour forth.” Invading Roman soldiers, seeking respite from the cold, managed to discover just about every hot spring in northern Europe--Spa included. Spa was discovered a second time, in 641, by St. Remacle, Bishop of the Ardennes, who is said to have performed healing miracles with its waters. But it was the English who made the name Spa synonymous with water cures, however unintentionally. King Henry VIII closed many of England’s own sacred wells on the grounds that they attracted crowds of Catholics who might conspire against him. When this happened, true believers started traveling instead to Spa--then part of the Catholic-ruled Spanish Netherlands--to pray at the springs there. As a sign that they had arrived safely in this foreign land, these pilgrims took to sending so-called “spaw rings” home--simple pieces of jewelry bought in Spa. Henry eventually lifted his ban on holy springs in England, but the term spaw , later spa , stuck as a generic term in English for all such watering holes.

Spa’s own fame spread rapidly. The French essayist Montaigne traveled to Spa in 1580, noting in his journal the appearance of fine filaments of iron shining like “little sparkles” in a glass of the local water. (An old saying has it that, at Spa, one “drinks iron to acquire the quality of steel.”) In 1583, Henri III of France had vessels of water from local springs sent to his castle in Mezieres--the earliest known example of exported mineral water. By the early 18th Century, an annual average of 130,000 wicker-covered bottles of Spa water were being sent abroad annually in the belief that it could cure both infertility and indigestion.

Other notables who visited Spa include Czar Peter the Great (who was cured of chronic indigestion here in 1717 and became one of the town’s greatest promoters), Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II (who dubbed the place “the Cafe of Europe”), Napoleon III and his wife, the Empress Eugenie, the Duke of Wellington (who came here after Waterloo), Casanova, Descartes, Fragonard, Dumas and Victor Hugo. During World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II made Spa his headquarters--and even had fake trenches dug nearby to simulate the real battlefront for photographers.

In Spa’s heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, a typical morning here began at dawn with a glass of water at the main spring in the town itself, the neoclassical Pouhon Pierre Le Grand (named in honor of Peter the Great). The rest of the day would be spent fashionably promenading through landscaped parks or off into the countryside on a “tour of the fountains.”Three times a day, an orchestra performed at an open-air bandstand, and it was considered important to “dress” for the tea-dance at 4 p.m. At 7, the “Glass of Water Hour” arrived, to be enjoyed by one and all--well-bred commoners and the nobility and elite alike--in the formal gardens of Le Parc de Sept Heures (now the site of a popular Sunday flea market). This temporary suspension of the usual social constraints fueled the opinion in some quarters that spas were hotbeds of immorality--an impression only encouraged, incidentally, when Spa built its casino in 1763. Gaudier than Les Thermes, with an excess of black and multicolored marble and gold trim everywhere, the Casino is still open every day of the year except Christmas Eve, though it must be said that today it attracts more rayon than royalty.

The only well-known American author to visit Spa and write home about it seems to have been James Fenimore Cooper, who came here in the early 1830s with his gout-plagued wife. In a letter to Samuel B. Morse, he described his stay at “the famous hard-drinking, dissipated, gambling, intriguing Spa” as “infinitely clean” and “dull as a desert”--and went on to complain that English guests would look away at his approach, “as if they were afraid some tailor had broke loose.” Cooper’s favorite activity at Spa was hiking, which remains a popular occupation there today. About 200 old promenade paths still weave through the countryside, with benches and other resting places located strategically along them. The paths’ very names recall an earlier time--Promenade of the Artists, Pavilion of the Eagle, Heights of the Wolf, Path of the Valley of the Heron, Oak of the Virgin.

Some of the promenades are for more than exercise and aesthetic appreciation, though: A five-mile circuit of bosky paths links six of the most prominent out-of-town springs together. The newest of these is La Reine (again named for Queen Marie-Henriette), built in 1932--a Greek Revival tempietto in the woods where the water runs pure and cold. It’s a perfect spot to picnic on local matjes herring and asparagus. The waters of La Reine may be tasted even in America, incidentally: The spring is the source of Spa Still Natural Spring Water, now widely sold in the United States. Another nearby spring, Barisart, produces Spa Sparkling Natural Spring Water.

The other major springs are La Geronstere, Peter the Great’s favorite, which has a restaurant with an elegant terrace view and good food (warm duck salad with raspberry vinaigrette, roast leg of lamb); Le Tonnelet; La Sauveniere (site of St. Remacle’s miracles, with another attractive restaurant) and Groesbeek.

The time-honored European idea of “taking the waters”--and especially the notion that the mineral content of various waters can offer relief from complaints as diverse as rheumatism, gout, obesity, poor circulation, hypertension, nervous disorders, impotence, even aging--seems absurd to most Americans. But the healing properties of spas are studied seriously, and spa visits prescribed, by doctors all over Europe. The spa ritual is so basic to most European cultures that it’s commonly built into insurance policies.

Yet spas all over the continent report a decline in attendance in recent years, and most are trying to update the spa experience to entice new customers--Americans included. At Spa, that means a series of new programs aimed specifically at health-conscious young professionals. These include the up-to-date six-day “Silhouette Cure,” which includes the services of a personal trainer and a diet consultant in addition to a daily regimen of baths and massages, and the single-day “Discovery Cure,” offering brief samples of various treatments, among them carbo-gaseous baths and underwater massage. There’s even a six-day “New Mother Cure” to help women who have just given birth “regain (their) seductive femininity.” Do these cures work? Six days away from work and family, having relaxing baths and invigorating massages, eating good food, taking long walks in an idyllic setting? It couldn’t hurt.

GUIDEBOOK: Taking the plunge

Getting there: Both Delta Airlines and American Airlines fly daily from Los Angeles to Brussels, via New York and Chicago respectively. Sabena, the Belgian national airline, flies daily to Brussels from New York, Chicago and Boston. There is frequent train service between Brussels and Spa, with a change at Verviers. The trip takes approximately two hours, including connecting time; round-trip tickets are about $27 for second-class, $40 for first class. By car, Spa is about an hour and 10 minutes from Brussels via the E-5 King Baudouin highway to Verviers and the A-27, direction Prum.

Where to stay: (Note: The country code for dialing Belgium is 32; local area code for Spa is 87.) A particularly pleasant hotel in Spa itself, located in a wooded park near the springs and the casino, is the 12-room La Heid des Pairs, 143 Avenue Prof. Henrijean, 77-43-46, fax 77-06-44; rates about $75-$150 per night.

Where to eat: Source de la Geronstere, Route de la Geronstere 119, 77-03-72; dinner for two, about $100. La Brasserie du Grand Maur, Rue Xhrouet 41, 77-36-16; dinner for two, about $100. La Sauveniere, Route de la Sauveniere 116, 77-51-68; dinner for two, about $80. La Fontaine du Tonnelet, Route du Tonnelet 82, 77-26-03; dinner for two, about $80.

Baths and springs: Les Thermes is open from 7:30 a.m. to noon and from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday and from 7:30 a.m. to noon on Saturdays. Closed Sundays. Prices for individual spa treatments at Les Thermes range from about $14 for a mineral-water shower, carbo-gaseous bath or postnatal exercise session to about $38 for an anti-cellulite massage (including lower-body bath). Varied full-day programs are available for about $60 and $75, and six-day “thermal cures” (not including hotel or meals), which run from Monday morning through Saturday noon, are priced at about $180 to $460. For reservations, call 77-25-60, fax 77-50-66.

For more information: The Belgian National Tourist Office, 745 5th Ave., Suite 714, New York, N.Y. 10051; (212) 758-8130.