The Pavilions

The historical sources contain little information about the three pavilions. The pavilion on the right was built in 1831 for billiards. Today, the health spring is located in the central pavilion. A pipe carries water here from the spring inside the Spa Restaurant.
If the door is unlocked, you are welcome to enter the health-spring pavilion and take the waters yourself.
The spring had probably been used by local people for a long time when Jacob Boethius, a physician in Gothenburg, examined the water in the 1720s. His investigation found many beneficial properties, and the spring became known beyond the immediate area. During the 19th century, visitors paid a fee for four weeks of drinking the waters.
In 1836, the Gustafsberg water faced competition. Drinking foreign mineral water had become fashionable, and an Uddevalla pharmacist imported and sold varieties at Gustafsberg including Carlsbad, Ems, Selters, Marienbad-Kreutz and Spa.

Read the 1842 Handbook for Spa Guests:

Handbook for Spa Guests

Anyone who, through fashion or a false view, has striven against nature should free themselves from such restraints while taking the waters and use the opportunity in every respect to heed and follow nature’s voice.

One should retire at ten in the evening and rise between five and six in the morning, since this accords best with the order of nature and is especially necessary for spa patients. Six to seven hours of sleep is generally sufficient. Too much sleep weakens the body almost as much as too little.

Sleep after the midday meal is usually followed by dizziness, pressure over the chest, general discomfort, palpitations, fatigue and a bad temper.

Dancing should never be excessive. Patients should not expose themselves to chills or harm the cure through late nights, late suppers and hard-to-digest delicacies. For anyone whose illness does not prohibit it, dancing with care and moderation is a harmless pleasure, though no more than twice a week. For some who suffer only mildly from abdominal complaints, it may even be healthy exercise.

Mental activity, if it is to accord with the purpose of the cure, should not amount to work or involve exertion. Serious brooding, memories of unpleasant official duties and harmful excitement of the imagination through sentimental novels, poetry, tragedies or anything that may produce a sorrowful mood should be avoided as far as possible.

Nevertheless, an educated person needs occasionally to devote a free moment to suitable reading and to correspond with relatives and friends. Idleness and inactivity, when they become boredom, are a torment and weaken both moral and physical powers.
Music is an excellent form of recreation, while high-stakes gambling is the worst of all.

Finally, the necessary warning must be given against excesses of other kinds. Everything already known to be harmful under that name should be avoided even more carefully during a spa cure, which inevitably produces a certain degree of general stimulation in the body.

Taking the waters – the Spring House and Restaurant

It cannot be stated with certainty when Gustafsberg’s natural health spring was first discovered and used, because no records survive at the site. However, the board’s accounts for 1787 show that the spring was then open for a fee, while its minutes state that the spring house was already very old and dilapidated in 1792. It may therefore be assumed that the spring had been known for a very long time. After the spring house was rebuilt in 1793, increasing numbers visited the health spring each year. By 1808, around fifty people used it annually, paying the modest fee of 32 skilling banco, approximately SEK 115 at today’s consumer-price level, for a thirty-day season. As foreign mineral waters became fashionable, first imported and later produced artificially, use of the natural spring declined, especially from 1836 when a Carlsbad facility was established at Gustafsberg.

This Carlsbad facility, which had existed for only four years when the handbook was written, served between fifty and ninety people annually. The waters were dispensed directly from the apparatus, whose taps with attractive labels opened into the spring hall above the natural spring.

Carlsbad and Ems: the four-week fee was 20 riksdaler banco, approximately SEK 2,400 at today’s consumer-price level.
Marienbad-Kreutz, Marienbad-Ferdinandsquelle, Salt-Pyrmont, Stahl-Pyrmont, Selters, Geilnau, Kissingen-Rakoczy, Fachingen, Spa Pouhon, soda water and Wildungen: the four-week fee was 10 riksdaler banco, approximately SEK 1,200 today.
Use of the spring house’s own water: the four-week fee was 1 riksdaler banco, approximately SEK 120 today.

Guests gathered at six in the morning and drank their glasses every fifteen or thirty minutes, depending on the prescribed quantity.
At eight, public prayers were conducted by the ordained teacher of the children’s home, at that time Master of Philosophy C. A. Sandberg.

While taking the waters, guests exercised by walking in the spring hall, the spa park or beyond, or by using the seesaws installed in the hall and park. Breakfast was eaten at around ten or eleven and usually consisted of coffee with white bread.