IN THE LATE 19th CENTURY, THE SPA resort of Baden-Baden was regarded as the place to be seen, where the crowned heads of the Continent and the idle rich came to while away the summer.

Mark Twain, who spent two weeks here trying to cure his rheumatism, damned it contemptuously as “an inane town, full of sham and petty fraud and snobbery”. Today, the aristocrats are long gone, but a new breed of wealthy visitors, with an abundance of time on their hands for lunching, shopping and sunbathing, has taken up residence.

Baden-Baden is playing host to England’s World Cup wives, who are causing a stir in its bars, restaurants and fashion boutiques. This genteel spot, where residents and visitors tend to be silver-haired gentlefolk with a taste for high culture, finds itself caught up in the media maelstrom that feeds Britain’s lowbrow celebrity obsession.

Women who most people have never heard of before — all sporting identical orange tans, giant sunglasses and designer label handbags — are suddenly big news in Baden-Baden. Photographers and reporters abound. There is even a Danish television crew trying to make a documentary about the antics of the paparazzi.

Along the Lichtentaler Allee, a 1½-mile path through a beautiful garden landscaped in the English style, the locals walking their pedigree pets stop to stare in amazement at the possee of photographers. The long lenses are stationed on the banks of the River Oos, opposite the lawns, sunbeds and terraces of the Brenner’s Park Hotel where the footballers’ wives, girlfriends, children and other relatives are staying.

“The wives”, as they are commonly known, made their first foray into town on Saturday night to celebrate England’s victory over Paraguay. Coleen McLoughlin, 20, finacée of the injured Wayne Rooney, led a delegation to Garibaldi’s, where they drank and danced for five hours and ran up a £428 bar bill, including seven bottles of champagne.

Some of the women danced on tables and on the bar before they linked arms and staggered off into the night singing “Football’s coming home”.

Victoria Beckham, 32 and a mother of three, has been behaving more modestly. She has been seen walking with her children, Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz — and their security detail — in the town’s elegant tree-lined parks. On Monday night she dined with Cheryl Tweedy, the finacée of Ashley Cole, in Medici, Baden-Baden’s most ostentatious restaurant whose past customers have included Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela and Bono.

The former Spice Girl and the present Girls Aloud star ate sushi and seabass, drank water and Diet Coke and settled a bill of only £45. As they left they cooed “Hello” to Miss McLoughlin’s party of 16, who were sitting in another room quaffing pink champagne with their sushi.

In another alcove was Nancy Dell’Olio, the partner of Sven-Göran Eriksson. Restaurant staff said that their sushi master, who usually has Sunday and Monday nights off, had come in especially to prepare food for “the English wives”.

Pre-emptive action has also been taken by some of the town’s boutique owners who have ordered in extra stocks of new season Gucci, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Dsquared. Several of the wives and girlfriends have been out and spent £4,000 in an hour-long blitz.

Monika Scholz, who runs a designer shop, said: “We’ve had Bill Clinton in town not so long ago and quite a few famous names, but there has never been excitement and hysteria quite like this.”

Roland Seiter, the town council spokesman, agreed. “Mrs Clinton and President Mandela walked through town when they were here and stopped for a beer and there were photographers, but not as many as there were when the football wives went shopping,” he said. “But this is OK, we know the English media have a different type of interest. It makes a change for Baden-Baden.”

The townspeople, who are said to include the highest concentration of millionaires in Germany, look on with a mixture of curiosity and disdain.

Although every bus shelter in town is displaying an advertisement with the slogan “Welcome Victoria” and an English flag, one suspects that many would like to see this World Cup circus move on. They should be glad, however, that they only have the footballers’ wives in town and not England’s tens of thousands of travelling fans.

“Fifa rankings had this as the top clash of the tournament so far, with the United States allegedly the fifth-best team in the world and the Czechs second. In American parlance, the Eastern Europeans opened a ‘can of whup-ass all over them’.”

Tom Dart, in 2006 And All That, our World Cup weblog timesonline.co.uk/wcblog