Alpamare Waterpark
Alpamare no longer exists. The waterpark at Ludwigstrasse 14 closed permanently on 30 August 2015, and what you find there now is a quieter, more ambiguous story. For forty-five years it was Germany's first wave pool — opened in 1970 under a cantilever hall with a fabric roof, a genuinely novel piece of engineering at the time — and at its peak it drew half a million visitors a year to the edge of the Bavarian Alps.
The site sits in Bad Tölz as a kind of ghost landmark: the attached Hotel Jodquellenhof briefly housed asylum seekers after closure, then reopened in part as a contractor's hostel. What Alpamare was, and what the land becomes next, is still unresolved.
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Book directly at the providerHow Alpamare Waterpark came to be
Max Anton Hoefter founded Alpamare in 1970 through Jodquellen AG, the company that had already shaped Bad Tölz into a recognised spa town. The park's wave pool — Germany's first — sat inside a large cantilever hall and was a genuine novelty: an American-style action park grafted onto a European thermal tradition. By the time it was certified to DIN EN ISO 9001 for hygiene standards in 1997, it was drawing international attention, and in 2001 it installed the first indoor FlowRider artificial surf wave in Europe.
Awards followed — a Parkscout Award in 2006, a World Waterpark Association Industry Leadership Award in 2007 — but visitor numbers had quietly declined. The Hotel Jodquellenhof closed in December 2014, and Alpamare followed eight months later. Anton Hoefter, son of the founder, was running Jodquellen AG by then. The Guinness-certified slide complex, the iodine thermal pool, the Bel'mare restaurant: all of it stopped on the same August day.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
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Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.