Băile Herculane

Băile Herculane is a thermal spa resort in the Cerna River gorge, where Roman legions established baths dedicated to Hercules as early as the 2nd century AD. The gorge setting — with limestone cliffs rising steeply on both sides — gives the town an operatic quality unusual for a spa destination, and the surviving 19th-century Austro-Hungarian resort buildings lend it a faded grandeur. Sulphurous and slightly radioactive thermal springs feed both historic and modern bathing facilities.