Thermae Bath Spa is a multi-million pound development project in the city of Bath in Somerset. The Palladian-style Pulteney Bridge and the weir at Bath. ... Somerset is a county in the south-west of England. ...

One of the city's main attractions is its famous hot spa water, which was the basis of the importance of Bath in the Roman period, and also of the development of Bath as the leading eighteenth and early nineteenth century health resort. However, the existing spa pools were closed in the 1970s as a result of the discovery of an infectious agent in one stratum of the aquifer. With the approach of the Year 2000, money from the lottery-funded Millennium Commission was made available towards a major project to reopen a safe commercial spa once more, and supplemented by funds from subscribers and from the local authority, Bath and North East Somerset. A new company, Thermae Bath Spa, was set up in the Netherlands to operate the new spa and allow tourists and residents to experience the natural spring waters. An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock, or permeable mixtures of unconsolidated materials (gravel, sand, silt, or clay) (see also groundwater). ... This article is about the year 2000. ... Bath and North East Somerset (commonly referred to as BANES or B&NES) is an English unitary local government authority that was created on April 1, 1996 following the abolition of Avon County Council, and is an administrative county in its own right. ...

The new spa is primarily sited in a new building on the site of the old swimming pool in Beau Street which manages to combine an ultra-modernist style with great sympathy for its Georgian surroundings; but there are a number of other aspects of the new development, including a refurbishment of the Cross Bath.

Originally planned to open in 2002, and despite a formal opening with the aid of the "Three Tenors" in 2003, the project is seriously behind schedule and over budget for several reasons. According to Bath and North East Somerset, the originally budgeted cost of £13.5 million will rise to £35.7 million, and there have been lengthy legal disputes with contractors. Further, the wrong paint was applied to the main pool and cost a further £4 million to remedy. A contractor is in a legal sense one who enters into a binding agreement to perform a certain service or provide a certain product in exchange for valuable consideration, monetary, goods,services, even barter arrangements. ...

As yet the opening date of the complex is unknown, but is expected to be in spring 2006.