French spa city soaks up World Heritage status

PARIS－Home to the famous spa resort in central France, residents of Vichy are preparing a low-key celebration to mark the glory and responsibility of becoming a World Heritage site. It is a prestigious status that their city won together with 10 other towns in Europe.

"Taking into account the sanitary conditions, we couldn't organize too big a celebration," said Anke Matthys, coordinator of Vichy's candidacy for the transnational UNESCO World Heritage site under the name "Great Spas of Europe".

On agenda is a music party in Parc des Sources－a park laid out in the center of town in 1812－on Thursday. When night falls, there will be a video map on the facade of Palais des Congres-Opera, a jewel of the city's architectural heritage.

"It will be an artistic creation of sound and light highlighting this monument, and showing the 11 towns that make up this World Heritage site to make residents and visitors aware of the fact that we are a transnational candidacy," said Matthys on Monday.

All these spa towns in Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and France have developed around natural mineral water springs and provide exceptional testimony to a complex urban typology and cultural movement.

"They bear witness to the international European spa culture that developed from the early 18th century to the 1930s … Together, these sites embody the significant interchange of human values and developments in medicine, science and balneology," said the World Heritage Committee last Saturday when it announced their inscription on the World Heritage List during its 44th session held online and chaired from Fuzhou, China.

The session was followed closely in Vichy. Giant screens were installed in the Palais des Congres-Opera for people to follow the exchanges and committee vote.

"The public was there since noon despite the weather and sanitary conditions. They were very interested," Matthys said.

When the good news was delivered in the afternoon, he said "it was really a great joy for us".

The waters of Vichy have been in use since the Roman era. Since the 16th century, they have led to the development of a spa city that would serve as a model in terms of its urban organization based on a street plan radiating from the station toward the baths and parks, along with its prestigious architecture.

However, during World War II, the town became the seat of the government of Vichy France between 1940 and 1944, which adopted a policy of collaboration with Nazi Germany. In French, the term "Vichyste" indicated collaboration with the Vichy regime, often carrying a pejorative connotation.

Royal connections

Yet, he noted that the two factors are somewhat related.

"It is because we have been a large spa city that welcomed the aristocracy and bourgeoisie of Europe that we had an enormous hotel capacity in the 1940s. The infrastructures linked to our history unfortunately led to the installation of this government in Vichy, which left us a black mark," he said.

"Fortunately, now it has been clearly said that Vichy is above all a spa city. Once the 'queen of the spa cities', Vichy must be appreciated for this rightful reason now."

Indeed, the city now offers guided tours for visitors who want to understand why that pro-Nazi government came to settle in Vichy and how they lived in this small town.

"This is part of the history that we have no problem tackling. And today, the true history of Vichy is 2,000 years of hydrotherapy," Matthys said.

Xinhua