Chiesa di San Salvatore ai Bagni

Where five thermal springs rise at the foot of the Baranci group, the chapel of San Salvatore preserves the memory of San Candido's former spa. Built from 1591 and consecrated in 1594 for bath guests, it contains a winged altar whose predella depicts the baths as they appeared in the sixteenth century.

Why it matters

The Bagni (Bad) district of San Candido owes everything to water. The municipality's historical path records five thermal springs at this spot and a plausible sanctuary already in Roman times; a hermitage tended the site in the later Middle Ages, dissolved only in 1786. When spa activity revived in the sixteenth century, San Candido's residents built a chapel dedicated to Salvatore, completing it in 1591 and consecrating it in 1594. The building was tied to the curative springs that supported the Bagni.

That business is now gone. Until the First World War the Bagni di San Candido operated as a luxury thermal hotel; today only ruins remain of that grandeur, in the municipality's own words. The chapel is therefore the last intact witness of a thermal history that shaped this corner of the municipality for four centuries, and its altarpiece is the site's only surviving picture.

What to notice

The chapel displays a full-size photographic copy of its winged altar. The original, painted around 1590 by a Lienz workshop and donated by Margarethe von Spatz, is preserved in San Candido's collegiate church. The predella depicts the Bagni di San Candido, the hermitage beside the springs and the Rocca dei Baranci, or Haunold ridge.

The chapel itself is a single simple room of the late sixteenth century, its walls still marked by the damp history of the springs around it. The ruins of the former spa hotel remain near the chapel.

Context and history

The municipality proposes a Roman-era sanctuary at the springs, while the parish account more cautiously describes an ancient pre-Christian healing place. A hermitage attached to the chapel existed by the late Middle Ages and survived until 1786, when Joseph II's reforms ended it. The chapel belonged to the collegiate chapter of Innichen, which entrusted pastoral care of bath guests to each successive bath owner.

The sixteenth-century rebuilding came at the request of noble spa guests, who pressed the cathedral dean Hieronymus Schuessler for a proper chapel and helped pay for it. Baroness Margarethe von Spatz, born Hanin von Hanperg, funded the winged altar and endowed an annual sung Mass. The thermal hotel era that followed made the Bagni a fashionable address until 1914; after the wars the complex decayed to the ruins visible today, leaving the chapel as the district's consecrated memory.