The Vulcanus sauna will likely have you spurting out so much lava, you too will be satisfied being dormant for a long stretch of time.

The claim to be a sauna for mature age men is certainly not false advertising. Most of the clients at this sauna fall between the 70 – 85 age bracket. There are often a few that are younger than this. I maintain that ‘older for younger’ men can have a good time here though – the logic behind that: if a younger man appears at this sauna, there’s a good reason why.

I personally really like the photo found immediately above, for it shows, with visual articulation, that there is a fire extinguisher at the vulcanus sauna, just in case anyone had any doubts.

Jokes aside, it is important to show some photos of the venue, because this place gets a bit of a bad wrap as being a bit dirty. But it’s not really dirty. I’m a bit pedantic about cleanliness, so I found the red felt on the above featured chairs a bit icky, but I had a towel around me to sit on, and they do give you two towels on entry. To digress: it is all clean in the sauna, it’s just that the venue is in need of a refurbishment (easier said than done), and that gives off the dirty impression. There are many more pictures, permitting you to form your own impressions, found here.

The staff are very nice. The entry price at the time of writing this post is 16 euro. Massage service available. There is: a dry sauna, a great steam room (because, as opposed to most in Germany, you can actually see who’s standing before you in this one), a porn lounge, a decent-TV watching lounge, a bar/tables area, a fake fire place (the fire is an electronic moving picture of a fire – this is trendy across Germany for some reason unbeknownst to me), an outdoor/smokers area, and rooms downstairs for you know what. Condoms and lube are offered for free on request, but the lube comes in those little packets that are difficult to open and really kill an erection in trying, therefore I recommend bringing a tube of your own.

Despite a majority-retired crowd, weekends are the busiest time. The opening times on the site are specified as 11am till 10-11pm on Fridays & Saturdays, and 11am till 9-10pm on all other days – depending on how long the clientele sticks around. Most men arrive very early there (as appears to be the tendency for the mature-age-crowd in European saunas) and are gone by 5-6pm at the latest. Conveniently, 5pm is when the My Lord bar opens on the other side of the block.

Conclusion: I like this place, despite the need for refurbishment etc. I have tried to give as accurate a picture as possible in this post. Hence, whether you like/dislike what you have seen here, is likely to correspond to whatever experience you have there. I, and perhaps others, would be glad to hear about it in the comments below!

Also: a link to a more general post about the gay side of Cologne can be found by clicking here.