The Spa Restaurant
The health spring, or sour spring, rises here beneath the spa restaurant. Its water was collected in a barrel that was later covered by a simple roof. This early spring house was replaced by a more elaborate building in 1793. As Gustafsberg became popular as a health and seaside resort, a dining room and kitchen were added to the spring hall, turning it into a restaurant. The building has been altered several times, most recently in 1891. Inside the restaurant is a tap for the spring water, and a pipe carries water to one of the neighbouring pavilions.
The music pavilion was built in 1885 at the initiative of the restaurant manager Paul Cramer. Music held a special place in spa culture.
The health water was to be drunk to gentle music, and guests took walks while music sounded in the background. Travelling musicians gave concerts during the high season, and there were almost always guests who contributed to the general enjoyment through song and music.
Read about author August Blanche’s meeting with poet Wilhelm von Braun at Gustafsberg in 1839:
From Ny Illustrerad Tidning, 1862, reproduced by Mrs Carlen, Emelie Flygare-Carlen, in her memoirs and later in Jacobowsky’s book about Uddevalla.
August Blanche and Wilhelm von Braun
It was August 1839. The author of these lines had arrived in Uddevalla but immediately left the inn for nearby Gustafsberg, then visited by spa guests from almost every part of the country. A ball was under way in the spring hall. Young ladies and gentlemen moved energetically through the francaise despite the heat and dust. Those who danced then have surely long since left the dance.
The author made his way with difficulty to the back of the hall, looking for someone whose work he had read but whom he had never seen. He sought Wilhelm von Braun, whom he knew to be at Gustafsberg, but did not look among the dancers. Few great poets have been fond of dancing.
Then he saw a young man standing somewhat apart from the others. He was strongly built, with a broad face, thick dark-brown hair falling over his forehead, bushy eyebrows and moustache, and beneath the moustache the gleam of a smile. Cheerful? Possibly. Melancholy? More likely, as he watched the dancing and listened to the meaningless chatter.
That is how a cheerful poet ought to look, the narrator thought, and approached the young man with the smile and bushy eyebrows.
It is a pity no artist immortalised him there, perhaps John Arsenius, who seven years later drew the interior of a ball at Gustafsberg with several well-known spa guests in the foreground. Blanche, then a little-known writer and editor of the journal Freja, introduced himself to the poet.
“We must become brothers,” Braun declared, immediately leading the newcomer to the counter where refreshments of every kind were available. Braun pushed aside the lemonade, found something more suitable for men who were not dancing, and they drank to brotherhood, not merely for that fleeting moment. It was a great honour to have been Braun’s brother, and an even greater one to have been his friend. After the ball, the gentlemen arranged a late supper for the poet. The newcomer received his share, and a generous one at that.
It was late at night when the cheerful party broke up and Braun returned to Uddevalla with his new brother. “What dreadful heat,” Braun sighed as they wandered through the streets. “I shall not go to bed tonight. Let us see the town’s sights. The inn is remarkable for its dreadful punch.”
While searching for cool air, they entered the cemetery, where the poet became sentimental: “Oh, to live here. Everything is so quiet, and silence is my best friend. Here one is disturbed by no one, not even oneself.” By chance, von Braun eventually came to rest there. He died twenty-one years later at Uddevalla Hospital after falling ill during a summer stay on an island outside Lysekil. Another remarkable coincidence concerns the date of his death, 12 September.
Eleven years before his death in 1860, Braun had amused himself by sending friends a notification card with broad mourning borders announcing that “the discharged but not pensioned Lieutenant Wilhelm Braun” had peacefully died on 12 September. On the reverse was an invitation to a cheerful wake. In a series of travel impressions from western Sweden in the summer of 1839, Blanche also described “a day of spa life at Gustafsberg”. His account complements the story of his meeting with von Braun and Liljebjorn’s memories:
After brushing the dust from one’s eyebrows and trousers in Uddevalla, and making both crown and footwear equally shiny, one climbs with a cheerful face into a Bohuslan cart and, with the help of a horse and horsehair whip, hastens to Gustafsberg.
Soon one finds oneself among a large rural crowd filling the avenues and grounds. Can this be the company taking the waters and baths? Mon Dieu, are these people to drink the waters?
They know no artificial waters except cheap spirits, natural enough in their way, and no baths except perhaps the sweat-producing mire of hard work.
A leap from the peasant cart, a coin to the driver, a stretch of the legs, and one is ready to dance with the whole world if required.
Outside the spring hall, from which dance music and footsteps can be heard, country people in their Sunday clothes crowd together, gazing as though they stood outside a closed paradise. Humbly they open a path for fine cloth, thin muslin and curled hair moving towards the ballroom.
Blanche continues at length to tease the spa guests: the “invalids” leaping about, the dancing and card-playing officers, and the young ladies who strengthen themselves with spring water and salt baths for the overindulgent life of the towns, winter nights of dancing and excessive suppers.
He hopes that the artificial water will not remove the roses from their cheeks or the salt baths spoil their complexions. During his own cure at Gustafsberg, he and his companions had used only those “artificial waters” with the versatile quality of affecting stomach, head and knees at the same time. Behind the humour lies the fact that the old sour spring had nearly fallen out of use and guests instead commonly drank imported artificial mineral waters.
The following day, the literary drinking companions made an excursion to Gustafsberg, encountered a large carriage party, and Blanche took a bath, all of which he described in detail. The next morning, a small boat glided out along the canal from Uddevalla.