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Beitou Hot Spring Park<br>Soak to Your Heart’s Content at Great Prices

1.The Beitou Hot Spring Museum, third-grade heritage site, explores the culture and history of the Beitou hot springs. 2.The Beitou Hot Spring Park is focused on the Beitou Stream running down its center, covered with pleasant green. 3.Hell Valley, an enchanting fairyland always shrouded in hot-spring mist, has a water temperature of 90℃~100℃ 4.The water of the Beitou Open-Air Public Hot-Spring Baths contains beneficial traces of radium, great for convalescence, health-enhancement, and beauty embellishment.In 2002 the Beitou Hot Spring Park was the proud winner of the Community Participation in Space Development Outstanding Achievement Award as a part of the first Taipei Urban Landscape Awards. The space is centered on the Beitou Stream and thus has a thin, elongated layout, and has the comfortable, rustic Beitou Open-Air Public Hot-Spring Baths as its core attraction.

The facility is built sloping down toward the hot-spring stream. On the way up to the stream valley you pass by the exquisite landscaping of Xinbeitou Park, the distinctive aboriginal flavour of the Ketagalan Culture Center, and the exquisite Beitou Hot Spring Museum, a heritage site of the third grade sitting within the lovely Beitou Hot Spring Park. In the valley you finally come to the fabulous fairyland of the mystical Hell Valley with its thick wafts of sulphurous steam twisting skywards. The expansive park takes up a total of about 60,000 square meters, a grand outdoor display room of Beitou’s natural and manmade scenic wonders. What you can do is hop on the MRT system, get on the Tamsui line, and get off at the Xinbeitou Station. From there walk no more than 10 minutes and you’re face to face with the Beitou Open-Air Public Hot-Spring Baths. Head inside and ready yourself for fun. You’ll have to choose between hotmineral- water soaks at four different temperatures, in four pools. These are adjusted according to varying winter and summer climatic conditions. Because the mineral waters here are from nearby Hell Valley, and have a PH value between 1.2-1.6, even though they have been diluted, you must switch between hot and cold pools if you have sensitive skin in order to avoid problems. That is why the facility has two cold pools using piped water.

A look at Beitou Hot Spring MuseumThe manager advises that the Hell Valley waters contain minute traces of radium, and thus radiation. This is a very special phenomenon, found in only one other place on the globe, Japan’s Akita prefecture. The enhanced waters’powers are superb for convalescence, health-enhancement, and beauty embellishment. Your entry into this magical world is just NT$40, with absolutely no time limit. Visitors also love a round or two

Information
Beitou Hot Spring Museum
Tel: (02) 2893-9981
Add: 2,Zhongshan Rd., Beitou District
Hours: Tues-Sun 9:00am-5:00pm; closed Mon
Entrance: Free

Hell Valley
Add: Zhongshan Rd. near entrance of
Wenquan Rd., Beitou District
Hours: Tues-Sun 9:00am-5:00pm; closed Mon
Entrance: Free

in the coin-operated massage chairs in the entrance area. Locals say this is the great value for, and the locals know what they’re talking about! Note that in the communal pools here, meaning ladies and gentlemen bathe together, swimgear is obligatory. Didn’t bring any? Not a problem, there’s some on site for sale. As said, the source of the hot-spring waters at the Beitou Open-Air Public Hot-Spring Baths is Hell Valley. Management of the operations is entrusted to a private group by the city government. In 2000, Ma Ying-jeou, then the mayor of the city and now the president, presided at the official opening of the baths and also had a soak and a chat with other hot-spring-loving citizens. Because of this the baths are also sometimes unofficially referred to as the “Millennium Baths”.

Beside the current public baths, just down to the valley, you’ll see the attractively ornate Beitou Hot Spring Museum, housed in a large, classical building built by the Japanese during their era of colonial rule to house public baths for the people of that time. In today’s museum you’ll gain deeper understanding of the Beitou hot-spring culture and history of yesteryear. Up-valley and upstream from today’s public baths you soon come to mysterious Hell Valley, known as one of the “eight natural beauties, twelve scenic wonders” of the Japanese era. Here, throughout the year a thick mist simmers and saunters up and out of the narrow valley, strangely and hauntingly changing hue in the shimmering sunlight. The phenomenon has led to the lovely moniker, “Jade Mist of the Sulfur Springs”.