Hot Springs an ideal spot for exploring
That Hernando de Soto, he sure got around.
The intrepid Spaniard commenced to explore and trade in the West Indies and Central America before trundling down to Peru to conquer it over the Incans. After a quick return to Spain, he set out for North America, stopping first in Cuba before landing at Tampa Bay, where he and his band of soldiers then marched through the South hunting for gold before zigzagging across Arkansas and stopping in what is now Hot Springs about 1541.
Hot Springs honored the well-traveled explorer with a life-size statue at the Fordyce Bathhouse on Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs National Park.
The unquestionable showstopper of Hot
Springs is, well, its hot springs.
The near-mythical water for thousands of years has been attracting the likes of explorers such as de Soto plus, according to some accounts, Ponce de Leon, Native Americans, presidents including Truman and both Roosevelts, baseball greats such as Babe Ruth and Honus Wagner, and notorious gangsters such as Alphonse Gabriel Capone and Salvatore Lucania, whom you may know better as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.
Geology meets geography
The genesis of Hot Springs is plain ol’ rainwater that fell more than 4,000 years ago.
After seeping deep into the earth, there it percolates and heats up in the fiery furnace of rock that lies thousands of feet beneath this small patch of Arkansas real estate, its unseen energy then rising and venting to the surface in fricative bursts of steam.
The 147-degree thermal water is then gathered for all sorts of things such as bathing and drinking but more notably for submerging, soaking and massaging your cares away at one of the spas, new and old, dotting Bathhouse Row in Hot Springs National Park.
Hot Springs, set amid the wooded hills of the Ouachita Mountains, is the oldest park in the national park system. It is a unique place certainly, sort of like its more famous cousin, Yellowstone, with its thermal yet volcanically heated water.
The allure of the healing powers of the springs was the catalyst that brought the first bathhouses to Hot Springs during America’s grand resort era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and for Hot Springs National Park to be formally created in 1921. Several of those great stone buildings remain on Bathhouse Row, all lined up along Central Avenue in a mishmash of architectural styles, among them Neoclassical, Renaissance Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival.
Underneath the sidewalks and bathhouses, the hot springs simmer away and eventually reach the Earth’s surface. Some of the approximately 700,000 gallons that the National Park Service states flows from the springs in a single day supports “jug fountains” scattered around town, which is where locals come to fill their water jugs with the steamy elixir to take home.
“It’s the only national park where you’re allowed to take anything,” said Miguel Marquez, a park ranger at the time of my visit but who has since moved on.
“People pull up and get jugs and jugs of it. It’s water from the beginning of time.”
Delve into the town
The cool thing about Hot Springs is that not only can you drench yourself in the healing waters and history of the bathhouses, but you can also immerse yourself into the town and its array of things to do.
The bathhouse experience is, of course, not to be missed. You can “take the waters,” as the folks say down Hot Springs way, at either Buckstaff Bathhouse or Quapaw Baths and Spa, the only operational bathhouses fed by the springs that are within the park.
The other historic bathhouses have been restored and transformed into other purposes. The Fordyce is the national park’s visitors center, the Superior metamorphosed into a brewery, the Hale is a luxury boutique hotel and the Ozark is a cultural center.
Hot Springs is also the boyhood home of Bill Clinton, the 42nd president of the United States and former
If you go
governor of Arkansas.
Clinton moved to Hot Springs from Hope, his birthplace about a 90minute drive to the southwest, when he was 7 years old and lived here until he was 18. He is still beloved here, and plenty of folks know and are still in touch with him.
Clinton tourism is still big in this town. A selfguided tour of Clinton’s
Hot Springs features, among other places, the schools he attended, two of the homes where he grew up, hangouts where he ate hamburgers and watched movies, and Park Place Baptist Church, where he was baptized.
Hot Springs isn’t all bathhouses, Bill Clinton and Hernando de Soto. I walked the very colorful and pretty paths of Garvan Woodland Gardens, originally a native pine and hardwood forest, but now a lush botanical garden that’s home to dozens of bird species.
At Hot Springs Mountain Tower, where our small tour group first met Marquez, we were afforded grand views of Hot Springs Mountain, the Ouachita and the glittering jewel of Diamond Lake that’s a popular summer spot for boating, skiing and swimming.
While de Soto may not have found the gold he was seeking as he crisscrossed the South, he did find the treasure of magical water in Hot Springs.