It's one of Britain's precious relics from the Roman era and gets more than 1 million visitors per year.
But aside from fuelling local tourism, the Roman Baths in Bath, Somerset could have other more important uses.
A new study claims the natural hot spa – used for public bathing by the Romans around 2,000 years ago – has potentially life-saving properties.
Experts think certain microbes in the water produce antibiotic substances that kill common bugs likeE.coli and S. Aureus,which can both cause deadly infections in humans.
Thesesubstances could be used to create newantibiotic drugs thatoffer a solution to the massive problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
The people of Roman Britain bathed in the waters of the natural thermal springs, which still flow with hot water today
What are the Roman Baths?
TheRoman Baths is a site in Bath, Somerset consisting of natural geothermal spring water surrounded by Roman buildings.
The hot mineral springs bubble up from the ground at temperatures well above 104 °F (40 °C).
Romans constructed buildings at the site around AD 70 to bathe and worship thegoddess of wisdom, Minerva.
Today, the site is a major tourist attraction, although the public are no longer allowed to bathe in the water.
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AMR is when bacteria and other microbes adapt and evolve in response to modern chemicals designed to kill them, becoming ultra-strong 'superbugs'.
This ongoing health crisis could turn everyday injuries and routine surgeries into life and death events, undo decades of medical progress and potentially kill millions every year.
'No one will be cured of disease by swimming in the Roman Bath water – which they are not allowed to do anyway,' study authorDr Lee Hutt, a lecturer in biomedical sciences at the University of Plymouth, told MailOnline.
'But there is real potential that one or several antimicrobials can be discovered from the site to go into clinical use in years to come.'
At the famous site – which the Romans built a temple around in AD 70 – water gushes up from the ground as a natural hot spring at a temperature of 114°F (46°C).
Today, the site is a major tourist attraction, although the public have been forbidden from entering the water since 1978.
In October of that year, a young girl died from a fatal infection of the brain after contracting a dangerous pathogen in the water.
The Roman Baths is a site in Bath, Somerset consisting of natural geothermal spring water surrounded by Roman buildings. A temple was constructed on the site between 60 and 70 AD in the first few decades of Roman Britain and its remains are a major tourist attraction
Under a very high magnification of 20,000x, this scanning electron micrograph (SEM) shows a strain of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria
The new study is the first to provide a 'detailed examination of the bacterial and archaeal communities found within the waters' of the popular tourist attraction.
Dr Hutt and colleagues analysed water samples from the Roman Baths and identified300 distinct types of bacteria.
Tests revealed that 15 of them – including Proteobacteria and Firmicutes – are potentially producing antimicrobial substances that inhibit other pathogenic microbes that are fuelling the AMR crisis, including E.coli, Staphylococcus Aureus and Shigella flexneri.
Staphylococcus aureus can lead to serious infections like blood poisoning and toxic shock syndrome, whileE.colicauses potentially lethal infections of the bloodstream.
Meanwhile, shigella flexneri causes dysentery, a disease that kills hundreds of thousands of children every year in developing countries.
Dr Hutt saidthere is still 'significant amount of work needed' to identify the antibiotics and check the suitability of them for use in humans.
'This study has for the first time demonstrated some of the microorganisms present within the Roman Baths, revealing them as a potential source of novel antimicrobial discovery,' said the academic.
'There is no small irony in the fact that the waters of the Roman Baths have long been regarded for their medicinal properties.
'Now, thanks to advances in modern science, we might be on the verge of discovering the Romans and others since were right.'
The study has been published in peer-reviewed journalThe Microbe.
Antimicrobial resistance 'as dangerous as terrorism', warns expert
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medicines, making common infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death.
Antibiotics have been doled out unnecessarily by GPs and hospital staff for decades, fueling once harmless bacteria to become superbugs.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has previously warned if nothing is done the world is heading for a 'post-antibiotic' era.
It claimed common infections, such as chlamydia, will become killers without immediate solutions to the growing crisis.
Bacteria can become drug resistant when people take incorrect doses of antibiotics or if they are given out unnecessarily.
Former chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies previously claimed that the threat of antibiotic resistance is 'as big a risk as terrorism'.
'If we don't take action, then we may all be back in an almost 19th century environment where infections kill us as a result of routine operations,' she said.
'We won't be able to do a lot of our cancer treatments or organ transplants.'
WHO estimates that superbugs will kill 10 million people each year by 2050, with patients succumbing to once harmless bugs.
Professor Michael Kinch, an American scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, explained AMR in Bill Bryson's 2019 book 'The Body'.
Professor Kinch said: 'We tend to refer to the antibiotics crisis as a looming one, but it is not that at all - it's a current crisis.'
Another unnamed expert told Bryson: ' We are looking at a possibility where we can't do hip replacements or other routine procedures because the risk of infection is too high.'
