Jermuk

Jermuk sits at over two thousand metres in the Vayots Dzor highlands, and you feel the altitude the moment you step out of the car — thinner air, sharper light, a cold that has nothing to do with the season. The town is best understood as a monument to a particular Soviet idea: that the workers of the union deserved their fortnight at a mineral spa, and that this should be built at scale, in concrete, in a mountain setting too grand for the architecture. Half the grand sanatoriums are shuttered now. The other half soldier on, and the effect is strange and a little melancholy and entirely worth seeing.

The Gallery of Warm Water

The heart of it all is the drinking gallery, a long pavilion where mineral water of varying temperatures runs from a row of stone swans’ necks. This is the whole point of Jermuk — the water comes up hot from the earth, faintly sulphurous, and people travel here specifically to drink it on the theory that it is good for the liver, the stomach, the everything. I tried the hottest tap, around fifty degrees, and it tasted exactly like warm coins. Lia managed two sips and gave me a look that ended the experiment.

What I did not expect was how much I liked the ritual of it — the elderly Armenians filling plastic bottles with practised seriousness, the steam rising in the cold gallery, the sense of a health culture that predates every wellness app by about a century. Nobody was performing. They simply believed in the water, and there is something restful about being among people who believe in a simple thing.

The Waterfall and the Edge of the Gorge

A short walk from the town the land falls away into the Arpa gorge, and here the Jermuk waterfall drops some seventy metres down the cliff. Locals call it the Mermaid’s Hair, after a legend about a girl who threw herself off the edge, and in the thin light it does have that fanned, falling-tresses look. We followed the path along the rim, the forest going copper and gold around us — late October is kind to this valley — until we reached an overlook where the whole gorge opened up.

Below, the river; above, the brutalist sanatoriums catching the last sun; in between, nothing but cold clean air and the distant hiss of the fall. We sat on a rock and ate apricots bought that morning in the valley, and I thought that Jermuk gets it backwards from most spa towns. The water is forgettable. The mountains around it are not.

When to go: Late September through October for the autumn colour in the gorge and crisp, clear days. Summer is pleasantly cool when the lowlands bake, and winter brings a small ski operation, though many sanatoriums slow to a crawl in the cold months.