Karlovy Vary and the Bohemian spa towns

The fashion for taking the waters reached its height in the nineteenth century, and nowhere did it with more style than western Bohemia. Three spa towns lie close together near the German border, Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně and Františkovy Lázně, known in German as Karlsbad, Marienbad and Franzensbad. Together with other great spas of Europe, they were inscribed by UNESCO in 2021 as part of a single World Heritage Site, the Great Spa Towns of Europe.

What they share is water, rising hot or cold and full of minerals from deep underground, and an architecture designed entirely around it: colonnades where the springs are channelled into fountains, grand hotels and sanatoria, promenades, parks and theatres. The idea was that a cure took weeks, and that people needed something to do between glasses.

Karlovy Vary, the hot one

Karlovy Vary is the largest and oldest of the three, strung out along a narrow wooded valley where the little river Teplá winds between steep hills. Its name means Charles's Baths, after the emperor Charles IV, who, according to legend, discovered the springs while hunting in the fourteenth century. Its waters rise at high temperatures; the hottest spring, the Vřídlo, shoots up as a geyser inside a modern colonnade, at around seventy degrees Celsius.

The town's guest list over the years reads like a history of Europe. Peter the Great came, and so did Goethe, many times. Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms spent time here; Karl Marx visited for his liver. Visitors still walk the colonnades sipping the warm, salty water from a special porcelain cup with a spout in its handle, the lázeňský pohárek, which can be bought everywhere in the town.

Each July the town takes on another identity, as the host of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, one of the oldest film festivals in the world, first held just after the Second World War. For a week or so the colonnades and grand hotels fill with directors, actors and film-goers, and the Hotel Thermal, a large concrete building of the communist era, becomes the centre of attention.

The town also produces two famous products. Becherovka, a herbal liqueur created by a local pharmacist in the early nineteenth century, is said to be good for the stomach; its recipe remains a secret. And Karlovy Vary's wafers, large thin spa wafers filled with sweet layers, are sold warm in every street.

Mariánské Lázně, the green one

Mariánské Lázně is younger, laid out in the early nineteenth century in a broad valley surrounded by forest, and it feels more like a park than a town. Its centrepiece is a long cast-iron colonnade, and nearby is a singing fountain whose jets move to music on the hour. The town attracted its own illustrious guests: Goethe fell in love here, in his seventies, with a teenage girl and wrote one of his great poems about it, and King Edward VII of Britain came back summer after summer for the cure.

Beyond the spas

Western Bohemia has other attractions. Plzeň, the regional capital, gave its name to Pilsner lager, first brewed there in 1842 and copied, imperfectly, all over the world. A brewery tour is one of the more popular sights in the Czech Republic. And across the border to the north lies Saxony, with Dresden's rebuilt baroque centre and the porcelain town of Meissen.

The tours

Just You's Imperial Bohemia, Saxony & Berlin, seven nights for solo travellers, starts in Prague and visits Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně and Plzeň, before crossing into Germany for Dresden, the baroque hunting lodge of Moritzburg and Meissen, and ending in Berlin.

Just You's Christmas in Prague, five nights, stays closer to the capital, with visits to České Budějovice, Český Krumlov and Kutná Hora. It is a way to see Bohemia in its winter clothes.

The spa towns are at their prettiest in late spring and early autumn, when the parks are green or turning gold and the colonnades are not too crowded. They are also good in winter, with the steam rising from the hot springs into the cold air and the warm water a welcome thing to hold.