Considering protected areas as therapeutic landscapes: The role of cultural and natural heritage in comprehensive sensory well-being

Spa complexes are primarily interpreted through the curative properties of mineral waters and the immediate medical complex, often overlooking the richness of the wider landscape. This paper reinterprets the Slankamen Spa (Stari Slankamen, Serbia) as a therapeutic landscape that jointly supports sensory and emotional well-being through cultural heritage, protected natural areas, and historically embedded spatial structures. The study adopts a qualitative, interpretative spatial approach grounded in the concepts of therapeutic landscapes and landscape memory. Methodologically, it combines a focused review of selected literature that motivated the research, observational abstraction of persistent spatial elements from an early-eighteenthcentury historical map in correlation with contemporary orthophotographic imagery, and finally, spatial overlay mapping of cultural heritage assets and natural protection regimes. Rather than performing a strict cartographic comparison, the analysis identifies enduring spatial axes, corridors, and morphological relationships through which historical memory remains embedded in the present-day landscape. The results delineate three analytical areas characterised by different degrees of cultural–natural interweaving. By operationalising landscape memory through interpretative mapping, the paper contributes a transferable conceptual and methodological framework for rethinking spa environments as open, heritage-based therapeutic landscapes.