I grew up near Bled. As a kid, I used to walk past a villa that was slowly falling apart. That villa is the Kursalon, built in 1895 as the central hall of Arnold Rikli's sanatorium. Rikli was a Swiss natural healer known as the Sun Doctor. He arrived in Bled in 1855 and spent fifty years building what became Europe's first destination for natural healing. His legacy was systematically erased. First by nationalism. Then by communism. The building survived. The story didn't.
I acquired the villa in 2024. We're returning Rikli's story to Bled. Not as a relic. As a living place where his ideas about nature, light, and the body meet the world again. Reconstruction begins in 2026.