The Largest Indoor Hot Springs Pool in Colorado

Salida sits in country full of geothermal water, and the town captured some of that heat inside a remarkable building. The Salida Hot Springs Aquatic Center is home to the largest indoor hot springs pool in Colorado, and it has a deep history. It was built in the year nineteen thirty seven as a project of the federal Works Progress Administration, one of the great public works programs of the Great Depression.

Construction gave paychecks to local men at a time when work was desperately scarce. But the pool needed a source of hot water, and Salida found it a few miles up the valley. In the year nineteen thirty eight, the City of Salida purchased the rights to the geothermal springs near the neighboring town of Poncha Springs.

The hot water there emerges from the ground naturally warm, and rather than pump it, the city let gravity do the work. The water flows downhill through a pipeline all the way to the pool in Salida. Today swimmers soak in a large lap pool and a warmer leisure pool, both filled with mineral water that started its journey underground miles away and arrived, still warm, by nothing more than the pull of gravity down the valley.