It is always now!: Borjomi - where the real mineral water comes from

I'm already out of the travel order since I have seen already many things in and around Tbilisi which I have not yet posted. After a relaxing week in Tbilisi I started traveling around Georgia. The first station was Borjomi.

This small town is only 2 hours away from Tbilisi via minibus. The minibuses are here called Marshrutka, they are mainly he model Ford Transit and are very cheap. The ride to Borjomi cost only 6 Lari.
Borjomi is famous for its mineral water that is bottled from several warm springs. Short after their discovery by Russian and Georgian army troops, the water helped the daughter of the Russian viceroy of Georgia and so the Russians started to build up a spa town. Today the water bottling factory is outside the town and they used its former location to create a nice park along the main spring. It includes a theater, some sport grounds and a larger amusement park. As the season starts in April, everything was closed, only the park was open without entrance fee. Let's have a look:

This kind of bridges seem to be a trend - that I like.

There are currently built some new and large hotels like this one.

This spring is outside the park and free.
The locals use it to fill up hundreds of bottles a day.

This is the bottom station of a ropeway. I like this modern architecture.
The ropeway is part of the park and ends up at a Ferris wheel on top of the canyon

Inside the park is the Catherine's Spring.

Inside the park is this statue.
It is a symbol for a Greek god (I forgot its name).

In the park is also the ruin of Caucasus's first hydro power plant.
The park is beautiful and it is therefore not
clear to me why there was no funding to keep this heritage.

The place at the entrance of the park is bound
by some modernized buildings from the tsar times.

The building of the first bottling factory. Its interior was under renovation that was stopped for a while now.
I mention this because this is a general issue in Georgia at the moment.

Borjomi has also a small museum which is in an interesting house once built by a German architect. Around the town are the Likani Palace, the largest national park of the country and 2 ruins of fortresses. To go to the national park, one needs to register and can then join guided tours provided by the national park government. As it is still too early in the year for the park, I decided not to do a tour and also the park rangers said there is not much to see before spring starts.