Spa

Spa town in the Ardennes hills of Liège province, Belgium, which gave its name to all the others; see Belgium (Literary).

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Neither Here Nor There	Bill Bryson	journey waypoint	An off-season former royal resort, with brochures for alarming cures.

Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson (1991)

Source: Readwise highlight

Spa is the original spa town, from which all the others take their name, and for two hundred years it was the haunt of Europe’s royalty.

• Role: journey waypoint
• In the book: Rained out of Dinant, Bryson takes the train via Namur to Spa “for no particular reason.” He likes it at once: the Parc de Sept Heures, an outsized casino, and the Place Verte. At the tourist office he learns the kings stopped coming “since Peter the Great.” He reads the treatment brochures (mudpacks, “carbogazeous baths,” something like electrocution) and spends the evening in a bar on the Rue Royale with Martin Gilbert’s history of the Second World War. Next morning he window-shops the Place Verte in the rain.
• Why it matters: A minor stop. It shows how small Belgium is (“the whole country is effectively a suburb of Brussels”), and its faded grandeur fits the book’s theme of places outliving their moment. It also notes that Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated here.