Photo by Eric Kamoga on Pexels
🇿🇦 South Africa · Mpumalanga Province
♨ Temperature
43°C
⛰ Altitude
820 m
⚗ pH
7.1
💧 TDS
580 mg/L
🌊 Flow rate
—
📅 Established
Farm springs developed early 20th century
✓ Verified on 2026-07-22
Badplaas — 'Bath Farm' in Afrikaans — is a thermal resort in the Barberton Mountainlands of Mpumalanga Province, eastern South Africa, at an altitude of approximately 820 metres. The warm springs emerge at 43°C from a granite aquifer heated by residual crustal heat in a landscape of extraordinary geological age: the Barberton Mountainlands preserve some of the oldest exposed rocks on Earth, including greenstone belts and ancient sedimentary formations over 3.5 billion years old — among the oldest surviving surface rocks anywhere on the planet. The resort complex includes outdoor thermal pools, indoor facilities, and accommodation ranging from campsites to chalets. The combination of warm spring water and cool highland air creates a distinctly comfortable bathing climate different from lowveld thermal resorts. Surrounding landscapes include the De Kaap Valley (where the 1880s gold rush took place), the Makhonjwa Mountains (a UNESCO Global Geopark for their ancient geology), and an abundance of indigenous bushveld vegetation.
| Sodium | 92 mg/L |
| Bicarbonate | 265 mg/L |
| Chloride | 88 mg/L |
| Calcium | 35 mg/L |
| Silica | 18 mg/L |
The Barberton Mountainlands where Badplaas sits are part of the Makhonjwa Mountains UNESCO Global Geopark, designated for preserving the oldest well-preserved volcanic and sedimentary rocks on Earth — Archaean greenstone belt terrains 3.2–3.6 billion years old that document the conditions of the early Earth's oceans and atmosphere. The De Kaap Valley below the mountains was the site of the Barberton gold rush of 1884, which attracted prospectors from around the world to what is still one of South Africa's gold-producing regions.
Badplaas has a quiet, domestic character — a family resort for communities from Mpumalanga, Swaziland (Eswatini), and the eastern Gauteng — rather than the international wellness circuit. The thermal water, the highland bush, the distant sound of the Swaziland border — the resort sits in a specifically South African transitional landscape, between the agricultural midlands and the Lowveld safari country, between the colonial legacy of the De Kaap goldfields and the deep time of the Archaean geopark. This layering of scales — geological billions, colonial decades, family weekends — is distinctly Mpumalanga.
The granite aquifer feeding Badplaas' springs is a basement rock system of significant geological age and depth. South African water resource management requires regular monitoring of groundwater extraction from commercial thermal facilities. The Makhonjwa UNESCO Global Geopark designation provides a conservation framework for the surrounding landscape, and the resort's highland setting means it experiences rainfall patterns that support natural aquifer recharge.
Websitewww.badplaas.co.za
AddressBadplaas, Mpumalanga, South Africa