by numerous women who earned their livelihood in the scooping, transport and sale of the water in Eger. Feeling their water-bearing rights threatened, they demolished his premises. The town council of Cheb intervened and made the extension of Franzensbad as a health resort possible. The result was an extensive recreation area, with easy access from the town of Cheb. In 1852, the spa became an independent municipality. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was one of the most famous guests in the early days; his visits of Franzensbad were extensively reported in the book written by Johannes Urzidil Goethe in Böhmen (1932). Another notable visitors were Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Strauss Jr., Božena Němcová, Archduke Charles I of Austria, and Emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria, who promoted Františkovy Lázně to a town in 1865. During the 19th century, patients included numerous aristocrats, especially Russian nobles, and at the same time widely known doctors bolstered the reputation of Franzensbad as a therapeutic resort. Franzensbad offered one of the first peat pulp baths in Europe, popular especially with female guests. A public spa house was built in 1827. The writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach portrayed her stay in her early work Aus Franzensbad in 1858. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the spa was visited by up to 20,000 patients and almost 80,000 spa tourists. Until 1918, the town was part of the Bohemian crown land of the Austria-Hungary. After World War I, the town's reputation began to fade. Then part of the new state of Czechoslovakia, the spa lost much of its patronage and was hit hard by the Great Depression of 1929. After World War II, the German-speaking population was expelled under the Beneš decrees. The spa, officially renamed Františkovy Lázně in Czech, was nationalized under the rule of the Communist Party. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, a stock company was established to revive the status of Františkovy Lázně as a venue for international guests. Demographics Spa Twenty-three out of the 24 springs in the town are actively used, and local natural mineral water has a relatively high content of dissolved carbon dioxide, although the ratios of the chemical components vary across all of the springs. The mineral-rich springs are formed from infiltration of precipitation into the sedimentary Cheb Basin. The effects of the carbonic baths are shown in the better performance of the cardiovascular system, in the