Elisabethhalle Indoor Swimming Pool

The Elisabethhalle in Aachen is an urban indoor swimming pool in Elisabethstraße 10, not far from Aachen Cathedral. It was built from 1908 to 1911 in Art Nouveau style for a total of 900,000 marks and opened on 17 July 1911. The design came from the Aachen city master builder Joseph Laurent. The Elisabethhalle is one of the few surviving swimming pools from the era of Art Nouveau in Germany, which are still in operation today.

Visiting times are not always open.

Ingo Diesburg has been director of the Elisabethhalle for 10 years:
“What makes the Elisabethhalle special is the architecture and Art Nouveau, which can be found in all the rooms in the hall. Most Art Nouveau bathrooms have been modernized in some way. This makes us one of the few swimming pools that still have the style that it used to have. The location is also ideal for the people of Aachen. So you can reach the Elisabethhalle in the middle of the city on foot or simply by bus. We also often have visitors who learned to swim here as children or young people, who then find their way back to the Elisabethhalle. That's always nice too."
“Back then, the swimming pools were separate. There was the so-called women's and men's swimming pool. In addition, there were many baths and showers in the basement, in which people could bathe if they did not have the opportunity at home. Today the small hall is only accessible for schools, clubs or aqua courses and the baths are no longer in use. This is the biggest difference between then and now. Otherwise everything you see here is original. Of course you try to keep the hall technically up to date, but everything that happens here happens from the point of view of monument preservation.”