I live in Florida and, while I enjoy the moderate winters, I haven’t seen snow in many years.
.-= Chris´s last blog ..Alpha Dog Takes Over! =-.

Mike – I’m sure you did stay in the same hotel or in one of its neighbours. From memory, I think there were four or five of them. Like you, I had no real idea about the history of the place; certainly, I didn’t realise that the hotels were sitting on top of parts of an ancient city. I only discovered all of this when I did a little internet research in advance of my October 2009 visit.

In many ways, the hoteliers of the 1970s & 1980s were doing very much the same as the ancient Greeks & Romans – commercially developing a natural phenomenon for visitors! However, siphoning off the hot spring water, together with escaping waste water from the hotels, was beginning to damage the very thing that visitors came to enjoy. Hence the somewhat drastic action of the Turkish authorities in the early 1990s, which is apparently when all the hilltop hotels were demolished.

What the authorities have done since, is build a couple of open air swimming pools at the bottom of the hillside, collecting some of the spring water after it has run down downhill and deposited some of its calcium carbonate. Of course, by the time the water has reached the bottom of the hillside, it is far cooler than it was at the top! Unfortunately, these pools had already been emptied and cleaned out for the winter when we were there, even though the day time temperature was still in the high twenties Celsius.

I can remember walking freely around the hillside too.