Soap Lake is a small city in Grant County, in the center of Washington state, built on the shores of the mineral lake from which it takes its name. The lake is a meromictic soda lake, meaning its deeper layers do not mix, and it contains roughly two dozen naturally occurring minerals, a composition that has shaped the community's identity for more than a century. The city's population was 1,691 at the 2020 census, and it sits within the broad Columbia Basin, a landscape of coulees, lakes, and irrigated farmland. The area around the lake was long known to Indigenous peoples, who called it Smokiam, a name associated with healing waters. European-American settlement brought wider recognition of the lake's unusual chemistry, and by the early 1900s Soap Lake had become a spa destination. A sanitarium was established in 1905, and through the mid-1940s a series of sanitariums and resort hotels lined the shore, drawing visitors seeking relief in the mineral waters and mud. That therapeutic heritage remains central to the city's identity today. Soap Lake functions now as a compact residential and tourism community. Its modest population, lakeshore setting, and slower pace appeal to those seeking a quiet small-town life in central Washington, as well as to visitors drawn by the lake's history and mineral content. A historic natural spa and resort still operates on the lakeshore, and the city maintains a small-town, resort-town character rather than the scale of a modern commercial resort. The surrounding region offers extensive outdoor recreation, including the coulee lakes, Sun Lakes-Dry Falls State Park, and the Grand Coulee country to the north, making the city a quiet base for exploring one of Washington's most distinctive landscapes. The result is a place unlike most small towns: a mineral-springs resort community set amid central Washington's coulee country.