🇨🇿 Czechia · Western Bohemia
Few cities in Europe distil so much elegance from another era as Karlovy Vary. Wedged into a narrow wooded valley in western Bohemia, with the Teplá river winding through it, this spa town spreads along both banks a succession of grand buildings painted in pastel tones, colonnades of iron and stone, palatial hotels and high-ceilinged cafés. It is the perfect setting of the Europe of the great nineteenth-century spas, when emperors, writers and musicians came to 'take the waters'.
And the waters are precisely the reason Karlovy Vary exists. Numerous thermal springs at different temperatures rise from beneath it, crowned by the spectacular Vřídlo, a geyser that throws hot water several metres into the air. Tradition says you should walk the colonnades with a small porcelain spouted cup, trying the different springs — each with its own mineral taste — and accompany them with the famous spa wafers (oplatky) and, to warm up, a shot of the local herbal liqueur, Becherovka, which they call 'the thirteenth spring'.
This guide covers Karlovy Vary with the calm a town built for rest deserves: how to get there from Prague, which colonnades and springs not to miss, how to climb to the lookouts among the forests, where to buy the famous Bohemian crystal and how to make the most of its spa tradition. Recognised by UNESCO as one of the great spa towns of Europe, it is a break that combines history, nature and a pleasurable art of living.
By tradition, Karlovy Vary ('the baths of Charles') was founded around 1350 by the emperor Charles IV of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, who is said to have discovered the hot springs while hunting and, amazed by their properties, ordered a town to be built there bearing his name. The hot, mineral-rich springs made the town a health destination as early as the Middle Ages and, above all, from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when 'taking the waters' became a fashion among the European aristocracy and upper middle class. Figures such as Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, Tolstoy, Tsar Peter the Great and numerous monarchs passed through Karlovy Vary. The town flourished with splendid spa architecture: colonnades, bathhouses, hotels and theatres. In 1807 Becherovka, the famous herbal liqueur, was born. After the Second World War and the expulsion of the German-speaking population, and then during the communist period, the town changed character but kept its heritage. In 2021, Karlovy Vary was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site within the transnational 'Great Spa Towns of Europe'. Today it combines its health tradition with tourism, the film festival and a large flow of international visitors. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Bohemia of spa towns and heavy industry: Karlovy Vary and its spa tradition founded by Charles IV, and Plzeň, birthplace of pilsner beer in 1842 and of the Škoda works, on the Bavarian border liberated by Patton's army in 1945.
Read the history of Western Bohemia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The town's own name tells its origin: Karlovy Vary means 'the baths (or the hot springs) of Charles', in honour of Charles IV of Luxembourg, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, one of the great figures of Czech history. Tradition places the founding of the town around 1350, and surrounds it with a charming legend that is still told to visitors.
According to the most widespread account, Charles IV was hunting in the forests of this region when one of his hunting dogs (in other versions, a deer they were chasing) fell into a pool of hot water. The emperor, surprised to find those steaming thermal springs rising from the ground, ordered their properties to be studied; impressed by their supposed healing effects, he decreed that a settlement bearing his name be built there. A relief on the Market Colonnade recalls that scene of discovery today.
Beyond the legend, what is certain is that the thermal springs of the area were known and used from very early times, and that Charles IV's impulse — documented in privileges granted to the town — was decisive for its birth as a spa settlement. From the beginning, Karlovy Vary was bound to the hot water rising from beneath it, which would for ever be its reason for existing and its greatest wealth.
Although Karlovy Vary worked as a spa town from the Middle Ages, its great splendour came between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when 'taking the waters' became one of the great fashions of the European aristocracy and upper middle class. Going to a spa was not only a health matter: it was a social event, a place to see and be seen, to do business, to court and to talk about art and politics. And Karlovy Vary (then known in German as Karlsbad) was one of the most prestigious destinations of all.
The list of illustrious visitors who passed through the town is impressive. The writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited many times and loved it deeply; composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Johann Sebastian Bach (by tradition), Frédéric Chopin and Antonín Dvořák also passed through its salons and colonnades; writers such as Friedrich Schiller and Leo Tolstoy; and monarchs and men of power such as Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. That cosmopolitan clientele, and the Russian one in particular, left its mark on the town: hence, for example, the beautiful Russian Orthodox church of St Peter and St Paul.
To cater for so many distinguished visitors, the town filled with splendid spa architecture: monumental colonnades such as the Mill Colonnade (by Josef Zítek), grand hotels such as the Pupp, bathhouses, theatres and colour-painted mansions. In 1807 Becherovka was also born, the herbal liqueur that would become another emblem of the town. In those years Karlovy Vary lived its golden age as one of the European capitals of leisure, health and culture.
The nineteenth century brought Karlovy Vary not only its spa splendour but also the birth of products that would become symbols of the town and of the whole country. The first was Becherovka: in 1807 the Becher family began producing a herbal liqueur in Karlovy Vary from a secret recipe, which in time became the most famous digestif in Bohemia. It was nicknamed 'the thirteenth spring' of the town, in reference to its traditional digestive, almost medicinal, virtues, which linked it to the thermal waters.
The second great product was crystal. In 1857 Ludwig Moser founded the Moser glassworks in Karlovy Vary, which would become one of the most prestigious in the world. Its pieces of cut and coloured crystal, of the highest quality, became suppliers to royal houses, emperors and heads of state, earning it the nickname 'the crystal of kings and the king of crystals'. Bohemian crystal, with Moser at its head, has since been one of the great Czech craft prides.
To these traditions were added others, more everyday but just as well loved, such as the spa wafers (oplatky), the large, thin, sweet discs made since the nineteenth century to accompany the water cure. Between the springs, the liqueur, the crystal and the wafers, Karlovy Vary built an identity of its own, made of health, luxury and pleasure, which has reached our own day practically intact.
The twentieth century was, for Karlovy Vary as for the whole Sudetenland, a period of deep upheaval. Until then the town (Karlsbad) had a mostly German-speaking population, part of the Germanic cultural world of Bohemia. After the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, the region became part of the new state, but with strong national tensions that would explode in the following decades.
In 1938, under the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland — including Karlovy Vary — was annexed by Nazi Germany, before the occupation of the rest of the country. At the end of the Second World War, in 1945, and under the post-war decrees, the vast majority of the German-speaking population was expelled from Czechoslovakia. For Karlovy Vary this meant a radical demographic and cultural change: the town lost a large part of its historic inhabitants and was repopulated with Czechs.
During the communist period (1948-1989), Karlovy Vary kept its function as a spa town, now largely geared to workers and to visitors from the Eastern bloc, especially Soviet ones. Many of its sanatoriums and hotels passed into state hands. Although the cosmopolitan, luxurious character of earlier times faded, the town kept its architectural heritage, its springs and its spa vocation, which would allow its tourist revival after the fall of communism.
One of Karlovy Vary's great cultural assets in the modern era is its film festival. The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), held every year at the beginning of July, began in 1946 and established itself as one of the oldest and most prestigious festivals in Europe, and the most important in central and eastern Europe. During the communist period it was a window onto international cinema, and after 1989 it fully recovered its shine, drawing stars from Hollywood and from world cinema.
During the festival days the town is transformed: the Grandhotel Pupp and the Hotel Thermal become its epicentre, the red carpets fill with film figures and the spa town buzzes with screenings, parties and young audiences from all over the country. The festival gave Karlovy Vary a contemporary cultural dimension on top of its historic tradition.
After the fall of communism in 1989 and the later creation of the Czech Republic, Karlovy Vary lived a strong tourist revival. Its hotels and sanatoriums were renovated, investment and visitors arrived from all over the world — with a Russian and other foreign public especially numerous for years — and the town recovered part of the cosmopolitan air of its golden age. Recognition of its value culminated in 2021, when Karlovy Vary was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site within the Great Spa Towns of Europe.
The greatest recognition of the historical and cultural value of Karlovy Vary came in 2021, when UNESCO inscribed on its World Heritage List the transnational site 'The Great Spa Towns of Europe'. It is a serial property bringing together eleven spa towns in seven European countries, famous for their development around mineral and thermal waters between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Among the Czech ones are, alongside Karlovy Vary, the nearby Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad) and Františkovy Lázně.
The distinction recognises the role these towns played in the European phenomenon of the spa town: places where the fashion for taking the waters produced a very particular kind of town planning and architecture — colonnades, bathhouses, pump rooms, hotels, theatres, casinos, parks and gardens — designed for the health, leisure and social life of the elites. Karlovy Vary is one of the most complete and splendid examples of that model, with its thermal valley, its colonnades and its exceptionally well-preserved nineteenth-century townscape.
Today, Karlovy Vary combines its prestigious past with a fully touristic present. Every year it receives visitors from all over the world who come to walk its colonnades, drink the waters from the traditional spouted cup, buy Bohemian crystal and Becherovka, try the spa wafers and breathe that unique atmosphere of a spa town of another era. Between the history, the nature and a pleasurable art of living, 'Charles's town' remains the queen of the Czech spas.