Heisse Brunnen, Baden, Switzerland

For crying out loud: Yes, in Baden, bathing is allowed.

Baden in the northern Swiss canton of Aargau has a long tradition of also letting the common people enjoy their natural wealth of thermal water. In the 15th century Poggio Bracciolini visited Baden, he wrote about the public baths in Baden:

Before everyone’s eyes, on both sides of the square, lie the bathing pools of the crowd and the common people, into which women and men, young lads and unmarried girls, and the entire riffraff of drifters descend.

The a scene enchanted the humanist to reflect further:

Often I envy the people here for their tranquility and curse the perversion of our mindset, which always seeks to gain something, always aims for something, as we rummage through heaven, earth, and sea to scrape money out of them – never satisfied with any acquisition, never satiated by any profit. (…) We are constantly craving material goods with insatiable greed and never dedicate ourselves to our spirit, never to our body.

Of cause such frivolous acts and unpaid pleasures would not last into modern times and so they got closed off in mid 19th century. But the impossible happened in 2021, when a local association mastered funds and support of the municipality and build three connected outdoor pools right at the riverside in Baden and another right across the river in Ennetbaden: Free of charge for bathers, maintained by the city.