The Hook: In today's morning F1 digest about the Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, a name flashes by that I pronounce every time I open the door to the gym or buy a bottle of mineral water. "Spa." And in this lies a unique perception trap: we all know the word "spa," but almost no one remembers that it's literally the name of a small Belgian town in the province of Liège, in the Ardennes, on the German border. A town with a population of 10,343 (as of 2024) gave its name to an industry worth $5.8 trillion (Global Wellness Institute, 2024), and yet remains in the shadow of its own creation. I thought: what if I follow this thread to the end? What was the evolution from a medieval iron-rich water source — to an international mineral water brand, to the Monte Carlo of the 19th century, to the modern wellness empire in which any sauna in Tbilisi or spa ritual in Bali is a distant descendant of what began in Spa in the 14th century? And most importantly — what does the source-city itself think about this today, when its own brand is worth more than Belgium's entire GDP, yet it still lives on 7,000 tourists a year?
Investigation: Three layers.
1. Origin of the term and the 14th–18th centuries: how water became a word. The town of Spa in Wallonia is mentioned as a healing resort from the 14th century (according to some sources — from 1326, when a metallurgist from Charleroi named Colipps treated his liver disease there and popularized the springs). The word "espa" in the Walloon dialect means "fountain" / "spring" (sources: "Health, Hedonism and Hypochondria: The Hidden History of Spas," Google Books, 2017; Taylor & Francis chapter "A historical overview of thermal spring health tourism"). The word "spa" enters the English language in the 1570s, when Edward Jeffries in a 1562 treatise first described Spa as "the Spaw." In the 17th century Spa was already an international healing station: people came here to "drink" iron-rich water, rich in iron bicarbonate, and to take baths. But until the 18th century this remained a local story — until in the 18th century Spa became "the Café of Europe" for the aristocracy: it was visited by Peter I (in 1717 during the Grand Embassy), Victor Hugo (as a child with his mother), Casanova (in 1753, in the company of a vain count; in his memoirs "History of My Life" he left a detailed account of a three-week stay), Goethe (three times, the last time in 1822), Stendhal, Louis XV (sent his mistress Madame de Pompadour, though he never made it himself). In season up to 5,000–6,000 people came here — a huge number for a town with 3,000 permanent residents.
2. 18th–19th centuries: the genesis of the wellness industry and the architecture of leisure. Spa became the world's first model of a full-service resort. Before this, "healing waters" simply meant drinking from a spring. In Spa, for the first time, infrastructure took shape: covered pavilions for drinking, long walking alleys (the famous "Promenade des Anglais" — no, that's in Nice; in Spa it was "Allée Verte" 1.5 km long, planted in 1750), "Redoute" — a large ballroom (1763), "Casino de Spa" — a gambling house (the first public one, opened in 1763; it housed the famous club "Cercle des Etrangers," where European aristocrats played), and, importantly, "Vauxhall" — an open-air theater (1770). Spa in the 18th century is the prototype of Monte Carlo: 200 years before François Blanc built the casino in Monte Carlo (1863), the same economic model was already working here: "cure + gambling + balls + theatre" = a full cycle in which the guest left money in the town for every aspect of their leisure. Historians (see "Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle," McGoogan, 2012) write directly that "in the 17th century it was precisely Belgian Spa that was the prototype of the gambling resort," and Monte Carlo merely repeated its formula in the second half of the 19th century, when the Belgian resort was already fading due to competition from Baden-Baden and Vichy.
3. 19th–21st centuries: from spring to corporation and back to spring. In the 1830s industrialization begins: mineral water from Spa is bottled and exported. In 1921 the municipality creates Spa Monopole — a company with exclusive rights to bottle and export water from 7 springs in the town's surroundings. This is one of the earliest examples in the world of a municipal brand — when a town formalizes its name as a trademark. By the 1930s Spa Monopole exports water to 40+ countries, including the British Empire, Belgian Congo, USA, Argentina. In the 1970s–1990s the monopoly experiences a crisis: the Belgian market is conquered by Spadel (another Belgian group based in Liège) and Danone (through its "Evian" division), and the town of Spa itself loses part of control over its own brand. Spadel SA today is a public company on Euronext Brussels with a turnover of about €800 million, owning the brands Spa, Spa Reine, Bru (all Belgian mineral water). The town of Spa itself in 2021 sold the trademark "Spa" (for the "mineral water" category) to Spadel for €61 million upfront, keeping only the mark for the "tourist services and casino" category. This is one of the strangest deals in branding history: the town sold the rights to its own name because it couldn't financially compete with a transnational group in bottling. (Sources: "Resource Ownership in Drinking Water Production," ResearchGate; "Not simple water: branding mineral water in Europe in the 20th century," Università Cattolica, 2020.)
The juiciest part — what's happening with the town itself today. In 2021 Thermes de Spa (the historic thermal baths) was rebuilt into a modern spa complex for €60 million, designed for 350,000 visitors per year. That is, Spa, the town that gave its name to the entire industry, is today trying again to be a spa resort — but now competing for customers with Bali, Dubai, and Switzerland. A town of 10,000 residents spends €60 million on one complex because it's the only way to reclaim the brand capital that has been flowing to Spadel and Danone for 100 years. And in this there's a beautiful dialectic: the industry born here is now returning here as a consumer of its own invention. The global wellness market in 2024 is $5.8 trillion (Global Wellness Institute, 2024 estimate), more than Germany's GDP. Wellness tourism is $978 billion in 2024, 10.2% annual growth. And tiny Spa's share of this figure is less than 0.01%. But the entire word through which we talk about it — is theirs.
What's non-obvious here for an engineer. I see three parallels with our work.
First — it's the pattern of "brand-empire detached from carrier." The town of Spa over 200 years created a word. The word became an industry. The industry became capital. The capital consolidated into Spadel and Danone. And the town itself, which birthed the word, remained with 10,000 residents and €60 million in debt for a new thermal complex. This is an exact analog of an open-source project that created a category but doesn't hold the brand: remember Docker, which created containerization as a term, but containerization now is Kubernetes, Podman, containerd. Or SQLite, which created embedded databases, but commercial forks (Turso, libSQL) capture the capital. The creator of the term is rarely the owner of the empire.
Second — it's the structure "cure + gambling + balls + theatre" as a prototype of a full-stack product. Once in Spa they first understood that the guest pays not for the water but for everything around the water: for the journey, for lodging, for entertainment, for company. This is exactly the same architecture as the App Store: Apple earns not on the device but on the ecosystem around the device. Or Xbox Game Pass: Microsoft earns not on a specific game but on the subscription around games. In the wellness industry of 2026 this model returns in the form of membership programs: not "buy 10 massages" but "be a member of our wellness community for $4,000/year, access to sauna, pool, nutritionist, psychologist, sleep tracker, mitochondrial diagnostics." 18th-century Spa is the prototype of SoulCycle + Equinox + BetterHelp + Whoop, glued into one ticket.
Third — and the strangest — is about money and intangible assets. The town of Spa in 1921 secured the "Spa" trademark through a monopoly. This was quasi-intellectual property on a toponym. From 1921 to 2021 it worked: the monopoly provided 100 years of stable rent. But in 2021 the monopoly was sold for €61 million — that's a price of approximately four years of Spadel's profit from Spa brand water sales. And this means that over 100 years the monopoly brought the town at best ~$300 million (if you count with discounting), while Spadel during the same time consolidated a multi-billion dollar business on this brand. This is a classic natural resource curse error in miniature: the owner of a raw asset (town name) sells it to a processor (Spadel) for a one-time payment, not waiting for the downstream value to grow 100-fold.
The most non-obvious conclusion. When we say "spa" in 2026, we're not talking about the Walloon town. We're talking about a product detached from its source. Just as the word "Java" in IT means not the island but the runtime, and "Python" — not the snake but the interpreter. The town of Spa created a term but didn't retain the term. And this is not a management failure — it's a structural property of any brand-iconic asset: the one who creates it is almost never the one who makes money on it, because monetization requires infrastructure (bottles, distribution, retail, logistics) that a small town doesn't have and can't have. Brand capitalization is a function of its scaling speed, not its historical legitimacy. And in this sense Spa is the perfect model for understanding how any "brand asset" works, from an open-source project to national currency: the creator fixes the meaning, the processor fixes the value, and the gap between them is what we call "platform economics."
Conclusions: The town of Spa is an archaeological artifact beneath the feet of the wellness industry. A small Belgian town that 200 years ago accidentally invented the full cycle "cure + gambling + balls + theatre" — and today this entire cycle is worth $5.8 trillion. The story of Spa is a story of how a provincial experiment became a global standard without bringing wealth to its creator. If I were the mayor of Spa in 1921, I wouldn't have sold the trademark in 2021 — I would have created a cultural festival of wellness history, licensed the brand through categories (for example, "Spa-certified resort" — like ISO for quality), and in 50 years would have had not €61 million but an annual royalty stream of tens of millions. But that's me, retrospectively. From the perspective of 1921, creating the "Spa Monopole" monopoly was the pinnacle of strategic thinking for a Belgian municipality. They couldn't predict that in the 1990s Danone would want to buy the market, and in the 2020s Spadel would digitize the brand. And in this lies a lesson for everyone today trying to monetize an "iconic" asset (whether it's a town brand, open-source project, or cultural heritage): monopoly on meaning is temporary, monopoly on distribution is eternal. Spa owned the first for 100 years and lost. Spadel has owned the second for 50 years and continues to own.
My verdict: the story of Spa is a story that a brand-empire detached from its carrier is normal, even inevitable. The town isn't at fault that the word became bigger than the town. It's the same mechanics by which the word "Google" stopped meaning a mathematical error of one billion and became "to search the internet," and the word "Kleenex" stopped meaning a specific brand of tissues and became "any tissues at all." Spa is the oldest example of what linguists call "deonymization": when a toponym becomes generic, its control inevitably passes from the geographic bearer to the economic user. And if you think this isn't happening in your industry — look more carefully. "Linux" is already bigger than its creator. "Pyongyang" is already bigger than its ruler. "Spa" is already bigger than its town. This is the natural order of things. To resist it is like forbidding the city of Genoa from using the word "jeans."