The Springs of Saratoga
Saratoga Springs, New York, United States
The mineral springs that made Saratoga the Queen of American spas, with two centuries of healing-visit tradition and public fountains still drinkable in Congress Park.
Saratoga Springs grew from a few chalybeate and mineral springs that the Iroquois knew and the colonial world made famous: by the nineteenth century the town was the Queen of American spas, drawing the country's sick, fashionable, and hopeful to drink and bathe. The health-seekers' culture, its doctors, its water-cure regimens, its fortune-tellers and spiritualists who worked the hotel circuit, is documented in the town's own histories.
The springs remain public and drinkable: Congress Park's fountains and the state park's Mineral Springs each carry their own mineral signature and their own tasters, and the tradition of the seasonal visitor "taking the waters" is still performed daily. As a living American spring-devotion landscape, nothing else in the country approaches it.
Visiting
Congress Park, downtown Saratoga Springs; open public park. See the city's spring pages and Saratoga Spa State Park.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Congress_Park,_Saratoga_Springs,_New_York.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Traditions from this region
Traditions historically rooted in this region — offered as background context, not as a claim about this particular place.
Visitor stories