Casino de Spa

The Casino de Spa's founding charter dates to 1763, making it one of the two or three oldest continuously operating gaming houses on the continent. It grew out of Spa's status as Europe's original fashionable water-cure resort — the town's mineral springs had already drawn European nobility for two centuries by the time gaming rooms were formally licensed to entertain visitors between treatments, and the very word "spa," borrowed from the town's name, spread into English and beyond as shorthand for a health resort.

The current building, rebuilt and expanded over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries after the original Vauxhall pavilion, keeps the atmosphere of a resort casino rather than a purely urban one: high, light-filled rooms, garden views over the surrounding Ardennes hills, and a pace that assumes visitors have come for a longer stay rather than a single evening. Wagner, and later a long procession of European royalty and industrialists, are recorded among its historic visitors, drawn by the same thermal-town circuit that made Spa, Baden-Baden, and Wiesbaden the three great continental "taking-the-waters" casino towns.

Inside, the gaming floor mixes a large slot-machine hall with Roulette and Blackjack tables, a dedicated poker room that has hosted televised European tournament stops, and Punto Banco tables that draw a quieter, older clientele. Because Belgium has one of the stricter regulatory regimes in Europe — including the EPIS national exclusion register that all licensed casinos must check visitors against — the entry process is a touch more formal here than in some neighbouring countries, but it moves quickly for anyone visiting occasionally.

Spa itself, tucked in the wooded Ardennes and famous well beyond gambling circles for its Formula 1 circuit a few kilometres away, makes an easy pairing: the casino is a ten-minute walk from the spa baths and the town's belle-époque hotel quarter, and works well as an afternoon-to-evening outing rather than a full holiday base.