Dax: The Hot Spring, the Healing Mud and the Roman Crypt

Required Activities

• Find the Fontaine Chaude in the middle of Dax, the neoclassical basin built over the Nèhe spring the Tarbelli dedicated to their own goddess, put your hand in the water, and work out from the arcade how the Romans used a series of tanks here to cool it before it reached the baths

• Book a mud treatment at one of Dax's thermal establishments and lie in the same warm Adour silt that, by the town's founding story, a Roman centurion's lame dog found first — and that Augustus and his daughter Julia came to see in 26 or 25 BC, when the town was renamed Aquae Augustae in their honour

• Go down into the crypte archéologique on the rue Cazade, reopened in September 2024, and trace the high rectangular podium of the Gallo-Roman civil basilica, with its ring of semi-circular internal buttresses holding back the enormous mass of earth the Romans carted in to build up the marsh

• Look at the Art Deco front of the Atrium casino and the Hôtel Splendid beside it, both built on the site of the medieval castle of Dax at the north-west corner of the 4th-century Gallo-Roman walls, and find where the old rampart line still shows in the street