The Springs of Eureka Springs
Eureka Springs, Arkansas, United States
A Victorian Ozark town built around dozens of healing springs, still a working seeker town where the water cult and the mystic economy never stopped.
Eureka Springs was born when Ozark healing-spring water made a national reputation in the 1870s and a Victorian town grew overnight around the springs, sixty of them seeping out of the mountainside. The town's subsequent history kept the pattern: spas, then the Passion Play and Christian pilgrimage, then the artists and mystics who made it the Ozarks' best-known seeker town, with ghost-lore, psychics, and spring-water culture running alongside each other.
The springs themselves are civic monuments, marked and maintained, and the drinking tradition is continuous. As a landscape of American water-devotion, it is the Ozarks' fullest expression.
Visiting
Eureka Springs AR; the springs are marked on the town's spring tour map; see the city pages.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Basin_Spring_Park,_Eureka_Springs,_AR_at_night.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories