Sebastian Kneipp: The wellness guru that few know


Most people outside of Germany will not have heard of Sebastian Kneipp. But this 19th-Century priest-turned-wellness-guru is the godfather of some of today’s hottest wellness trends.

Knee-deep in a freezing-cold stream in alpine Slovenia, I was wobbling on one leg attempting to practise “stork walking”. Crystal-clear mountain water swirled around me making it hard to balance as I raised each leg in turn, keeping my foot pointing downwards. I was surrounded by a forest of dark-green pine, spruce and alder trees, and with the soft music of cow bells in the distance, this would be a scene that Sebastian Kneipp would have recognised from more than 150 years ago. After all, I was attempting to perform one of the water therapies he invented.

Kneipp is not especially well known outside central Europe. But this 19th-Century priest-turned-wellness guru is one of the godfathers of some of today’s hottest wellness trends. Born in 1821 and trained as a Catholic priest in Germany, he was driven to investigate “water cures” through personal experience. He had contracted tuberculosis when he was 26, which was often a death sentence at that time. However, Kneipp cured himself through experimenting with hydrotherapy, including regular plunges in the chilly Danube river, and thereafter evangelised cold-water immersion to strengthen the immune system. He also advocated a diet of mainly plant-based and locally sourced food and extolled the power of nature, daily exercise and a balanced way of life.

All this, more than a century and a half before Wim Hof, Gwyneth Paltrow and modern wellness gurus re-popularised these practices.

“Stork walking” is a cold-water Kneipp treatment to strengthen the immune system (Credit: Terme Snovik)

Kneipp began to treat people from his monastery and eventually set up a health spa, Bad Wörishofen, near Munich. Over time he became extremely popular, attracting a glitzy list of celebrity clients who sought out his expertise. Archduke Franz Ferdinand came for treatment, as did Pope Leo XIII. However, his motivation was to treat the poor and he did not turn away those who could not pay.

While Kneipp’s legacy is well known in Germany, his influence lives on in modern-day Slovenia as well. There’s a hidden connection with the pretty medieval town of Kamnik, about 20km north of the capital, Ljubljana, and I’d come here to find out more about the man and his approach.

The original spa at Kamnik was built in 1875 by Alojz Prašnikar, a Slovene entrepreneur who decided to invest in the nascent wellbeing industry. In 1891, Prašnikar’s company built the Kamniška railway branch extension from the Vienna-to-Trieste railway into the town, enabling people to receive treatment far more easily. Soon, the health spa, known as the Kamniški Kurhaus, started to specialise in providing Kneipp treatments, which had become very trendy by this point.

Sebastian Kneipp was driven to investigate “water cures” through personal experience (Credit: Ullstein Bild Dtl/Getty Images)

In 1892, Kniepp himself endorsed the Kurhaus and it quickly gained a reputation as one of the most outstanding spas in the Habsburg monarchy. Visitors flocked from Ljubljana, Trieste, Vienna and Prague. People usually stayed at least one month, and sometimes for the whole May-to-October season. The spa thrived, and the town became one of the most popular tourist destinations in Slovenia, along with Lake Bled (which was then associated with Rikli).

Today, little can be seen of the spa complex or the luxury mansions built to accommodate the wealthiest guests, but there are still some clues in the landscape if you look hard enough.

Jasna Paladin, an ethnologist who wrote her thesis on the origins of the Kamnik spa, showed me where the elegant spa buildings stood on the bank where the chilly Kamniška Bistrica river (fed by mountain water) meets the warmer Nevljica river (fed by thermal springs).

“This was the perfect location for Kneipp therapy, which alternates warm and cold water in some treatments,” she said. I asked her why Kneipp became so popular. “He wasn’t the first person that was healing with water, but I think it was because he made these methods understandable to common people,” she said. “Also, medicine at that time was often painful and expensive and people were afraid of it, so they were looking for alternatives.”

The benefits of cold water swimming

After Prašnikar’s death, the spa went into decline. During World War One, it was turned into a military hospital, and the buildings were occupied by the Germans in World War Two. But while little physically remains from Kniepp’s heyday here, two contemporary spas nearby are reintroducing some of his techniques.

Terme Snovik, about 10km east of Kamnik has been following Kneipp’s philosophy since 2017. Katarina Hribar, the director, told me that “we already had several elements associated with Kniepp: the gifts of nature and relaxing thermal water. And we added the five pillars of Kniepp’s theory: the power of water, plants, exercise, nutrition and balance.” Today the spa serves a Kniepp-influenced menu, Kniepp coffee (which is decaffeinated) as well as traditional Kneipp treatments.

“Kneipp believed in walking barefoot in nature to stimulate the senses and increase awareness as well as improving muscle strength and circulation,” Hribar said, encouraging me to walk a couple of kilometres without shoes on a stony path through the forest surrounding the spa. It was deeply quiet in the woods; the blazing July sunshine reached between the leaves and the silence was broken only by birdsong and the occasional distant hum of farm equipment. Forced to slow down and really feel the ground beneath my feet, the walk was quietly meditative, and although it was slightly painful, I felt surprisingly good afterwards.

Terme Snovik spa has a barefoot path to stimulate the senses and increase awareness (Credit: Terme Snovik)

Terme Snovik spa has a barefoot path to stimulate the senses and increase awareness (Credit: Terme Snovik)

Kneipp also developed a system of applying cold and hot water to the body, called “affusions”, to stimulate blood circulation. I was given a knee “affusion” where one of the therapists used a hose to trace cold water in a pattern around the outside of each of my legs, starting with my little toe – a treatment that is supposed to help with insomnia.

Hribar believes in the simplicity of these treatments and encourages her guests to make them an everyday ritual. “You don’t need any special equipment or thermal water like we have here, you can just do this in the shower at home,” she said. I don’t know if it was the knee affusion, the barefoot walking or the treatment with a heated hay pillow (another Kneippeian technique designed to ease muscles and joints) but I slept deeply and well during my stay.

On the other side of the Kamnik Savinja alps is a valley called Logarska Dolina. Nina Plesnik’s family have lived here for more than 700 years and she manages the family’s eponymous hotel and spa. Plesnik wanted to integrate elements of Kniepp’s methodology into her broader wellness offering here and went for training at the original Kneipp spa back in Germany.

At Hotel Plesnik, guests are encouraged to go “kneipping” at the ice-cold mountain water spring adjacent to the spa (Credit: Hotel Plesnik)

This is a reverse echo of history. Paladin had told me that Kneipp sent trained “Kneipers”, as his practitioners were called, to the spa at Kamnik to ensure standards remained high, and in this way, he had “helped the reputation of the Kamnik spa, not only by personally endorsing it, but also by sending doctors there”.

What is “kneipping”?

Kniepp’s name has become a verb in the Slovenian language. “Knajpanje” (“Kneipping”) has its own entry in the Dictionary of the Slovenian Literary Language and is widely used colloquially. It means using cold water for health purposes or just feeling good. “Even jokingly, we often say if the sea is cold, for example, that we are going kneipping,” Paladin said.

I asked Plesnik why she had travelled to Germany to learn from the source. “Because I wanted to understand the point of everything,” she said. “He was born poor and had this great wish to help people to heal. He found a way to do it, and I wanted to study properly, to know every detail.”

At Hotel Plesnik, guests are encouraged to go “kneipping” at the ice-cold mountain water spring adjacent to the spa. Early in the morning, as the rising sun was tinting the mountaintops gold, Plesnik and I walked slowly knee-deep through the freezing water in the dedicated Kneipp pool. Afterwards, she instructed me not to towel off my legs but to let them air dry instead, and showed me how to roll my arms in a specific way using the specially designed cold-water trough, another “affusion” designed to promote circulation and concentration. The cold took my breath away, but afterwards I felt a surge of energy coursing through my body.

Plesnik is also passionate about the nutritional element of Kneipp’s teachings. “He said people should eat less meat and more vegetables, he also made a lot of tinctures and teas from herbs and encouraged people to drink more water, which they weren’t doing much at that time.” Kneipp believed in eating seasonal, local food and Plesnik adheres to this principle. “We have our own gardens where we grow vegetables for breakfast, lunch and dinner, as well as herbs for herbal tea, and all our food is prepared from scratch,” she said. Ingredients are sourced locally, with the cheese, meat and yoghurt they serve coming from her family farm across the valley.

Kneipp’s core tenets are certainly not radical today. Indeed, much of what he taught has become mainstream. But that’s the power of simple ideas: they endure. As Paladin said: “It’s simple and effective, everyone can do it every day; walking barefoot on the grass is free of charge.”

BBC Travel’s Well World is a global take on wellness that explores different ways that cultures the world over strive for a healthy lifestyle.

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