The small mountain town of Spa in present-day Belgium had been well-known for its mineral springs from the sixteenth century, but its popularity with visitors soared in the eighteenth century. The town grew, and developed amenities like the Parc de Sept Heures, assembly rooms and a casino. It attracted the wealthiest families in Europe, as well as the aspirational middling sort who found the place affordable. The town was so proud of its growing reputation as ‘the crossroads of Europe’ that in 1750–1798 they published a record of international visitors called Listes des Seigneurs et Dames Venus aux Eaux Minérales de Spa (Lists of Lords and Ladies come to the Mineral Waters of Spa). The volumes named foreign visitors alongside their hotel and (approximate) date of arrival, and tells us that one of the hotels was named Hôtel d’Irlande – possibly due to the numbers of Irish who visited.

Irish women visiting Spa found themselves in dazzling company. Catherine Hamilton, daughter of the Archbishop of Tuam, John Ryder, befriended the Russian Princess Dashkova in Spa in 1770. And it was likely at Spa that Jenny O’Reilly Quin first met Prince Andrey Vyazemsky, setting in train her divorce from her Irish husband and her later move to Russia (there will be more about her in my forthcoming book on the Irish in Russia). 

Social life was a key element in the appeal and popularity of any spa town, but the reputation and curative properties of the waters were important, too. Specific waters were recommended for the treatment different conditions. In 1756, Charles Lucas enumerated the benefits of taking chalybeate or ‘ferruginous’ waters like those at Spa:

‘to warm, to cherish, to exhilarate, and invigorate; to restore due fluidity, and to promote a perfect circulation of the fluids, and to confirm all the natural secretions. […] From this then, the languid, pale virgin, may expect cheerful spirits, and a vigorous complexion, The cold melancholic and leucophlegmatic, the universally obstructed, desperate hypochondriac and distressed hysteric, and the enervated paralytic may reasonably look for, and must generally find, relief, from a most subtil, penetrating, active fluid […].’ [1]

The waters at Spa were considered particularly beneficial for the treatment of women’s health problems. As early as 1736–7, Catherine Naper and her husband James Lenox Naper of Loughcrew, Co. Meath, visited Spa seeking treatment following a number of miscarriages.[2] June Hamilton and her daughter visited Spa in July–October 1772 on the advice of her physician; she wrote at the end of her stay that ‘the Spa waters, have mended my health’. [3]

In the 1760s, one writer observed that the Geronstere spring had a ‘peculiar credit and reputation’ among female visitors, with the result that ‘their restless charms attract the cavaliers to the same favourite spot’. [4]

The waters at Spa still had their adherents in the mid-nineteenth century, with middle-class Irish continuing to travel there. Ulster-born physician James Johnson particularly recommended a combination of the waters, exercise, and the mountain air: 

‘The pallid female, affected with complaints peculiar to the sex, may expect to acquire a healthy complexion, and general strength from the waters of Spa, assisted by mountain air and daily exercise. Sterility is one of the many maladies for which they are loudly praised by the resident physicians.’ [5]

The emphasis on the particular benefits that Spa water was thought to have for women’s health goes some way towards explaining the numbers of Irish women there, but the guarantee of a lively summer season attended by a fascinating array of people from all over Europe, from the continent’s oldest noble families, the nouveaux-riche mercantile class, and the aspirational middle-class, certainly made a season at Spa all the more attractive a prospect.  

Notes:

[1] C. Lucas, An Essay on Waters: In Three Parts. Part II. Of Cold Medicated Waters (1756), p. 260.

[2] NLI: Papers of the Family of Smythe of Barbavilla MS 41,581/16.

[3] June Hamilton, Tour of France and Germany, 1772 (NLI MS 1706, typescript), 1 Oct.

[4] J.P. de Limbourg, New Amusements of the German Spa, vol. 2 (2 vols, Dublin: Cotter et al, 1765), p. 33.

[5] James Johnson, Pilgrimages to the Spas (1841), p. 147.

See also my chapter, ‘Les Voyageuses Irlandaises à Spa au 18e Siècle.’ Spa, Carrefour de l’Europe des Lumières. Les Hôtes de la Cité Thermale au XVIIIe Siècle, ed. Daniel Droixhe with Muriel Collart (Hermann, 2013), pp. 67–87.