An emperor’s hunting party is said to have found the spring, a confectioner’s family built the hotel that later played a casino town in a Bond film, and a pharmacist’s herbal recipe from 1807 still leaves the town in green bottles.

Karlovy Vary takes its name from Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, who according to legend came upon the hot spring around 1349 while hunting in the forests near Loket; whatever the truth of the story, it was Charles who granted the settlement its town privileges on 14 August 1370, and the German name Karlsbad — Charles’s Bath — stayed in use for most of the six centuries that followed. The town grew along the narrow valley of the Teplá, which joins the Ohře just below it, around a spring that still sets the tone: Vřídlo, the hottest in the country at up to about 73 °C, rising in a jet of as much as twelve metres. By the eighteenth century the season drew the courts of Europe — Peter the Great came in 1711 and again in 1712 — and in the nineteenth it became an institution, growing from 134 visiting families in the 1756 season to some 26,000 guests a year by the century’s end, among them Goethe, who returned again and again. The town built to receive them is the one still standing: Josef Zítek’s neo-Renaissance Mill Colonnade of the 1870s, the wooden Market Colonnade, and the Grandhotel Pupp, which Viennese architects Fellner & Helmer rebuilt between 1896 and 1907 from the halls a local confectioner’s family had acquired over the previous century. Two local names date from the same prosperity: Josef Becher’s herbal liqueur, produced since 1807, and Ludwig Moser’s glassworks, founded in 1857.

That world was overwhelmingly German-speaking — the 1930 census counted 20,856 ethnic Germans among 23,901 inhabitants — and it ended after the Second World War, when most of them were expelled; under Communism the spas were nationalised and the Pupp renamed Grandhotel Moskva in 1950, while the modernist Hotel Thermal was built in the 1970s as the home of a film festival first held in 1946, which still gathers the industry in the town each July. Cinema has returned the favour: in 2006 Casino Royale turned Karlovy Vary into Montenegro, casting the Pupp as the Hotel Splendide, the Imperial Spa as the casino and the Mill Colonnade as a railway station, while the same hotel hosted Queen Latifah in Last Holiday and has been cited as an inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel. In 2021 Karlovy Vary was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the Great Spa Towns of Europe, alongside its West Bohemian neighbours Mariánské Lázně and Františkovy Lázně, and today the porcelain spa cup carried from colonnade to colonnade remains the most recognisable souvenir of a tradition more than six centuries old.