The old bathhouse in Liepāja (Liepājas peldiestāde)

Liepāja became a resort as early as the beginning of the 19th century, but the town turned into a fashionable resort spot after the heir to the throne, Grand Duke Nikolai Alexandrovich, visited in the 1860s, followed soon after by his father, Emperor Alexander II, with his wife and the whole household. There was a "Nicholas bathing establishment with hot and cold baths" here, along with mud baths and wraps.
In the early 1900s the town's chief architect, Pauls Makss Berči, built a new bathhouse in the style of a Roman villa with an open Doric colonnade. Inside were warm seawater baths, several different bath houses and medicinal waters. During the first Republic the resort worked and developed successfully and the range of baths grew; later, under Soviet rule, people came to the popular Liepāja sanatorium from all over the USSR.
In the hard years of transition the sanatorium closed. Since the end of 1993 the bathhouse has stood empty, and over those years the historic building has decayed very badly. It changed owners several times, but nothing came of it.
In 2021 the property and the land were bought by the Lithuanian company Liepojos kopos ("Liepāja dunes"), a subsidiary of SPA Birštonas, which has long worked in spa medicine. The new owners said at once that they wanted to develop a resort complex in Liepāja and intended to preserve the old building down to the last brick; as of 2022 it was to become the calling card of the new resort.
In May 2022 a public consultation began in Liepāja on the sketches from the design competition for converting the old bathhouse into a modern spa centre, with the historic building to be carefully integrated into the new one.