The Town

HERRENALB grew up around a Cistercian monastery, founded in the mid-1100s in the northern Black Forest on a bank of the River Alb, a tributary of the Rhine.

View from my balcony

Today its 8,000+ population lives less than 20 miles from the French border.

In about 1840 a sanatorium, based on cold-water therapy, was founded in what was then a village, the latter's upgrade to town status coming in 1887.

A well bored down 600 metres in 1964 reached a thermal spring, which led to the building of thermal baths and the granting of the prefix Bad (Spa) in 1971.