Karlovy Vary & Loket Castle: Spa Waters and the Casino Royale Castle

A private Karlovy Vary and Loket Castle day trip from Prague pairs Europe's most celebrated spa town with one of Central Bohemia's oldest stone castles — two contrasting Western Bohemian icons in a single day. Karlovy Vary lies about 130 kilometres west of Prague, in the wooded valleys of Western Bohemia, and just 12 kilometres further sits Loket, its medieval castle wrapped almost entirely by a hairpin bend of the Ohře River. Your guide picks you up at your hotel and drives you door-to-door, so the whole day unfolds at your own pace — colonnades and hot springs in the morning, a fairy-tale castle in the afternoon.

Two names tie these places together: Charles IV and Goethe. The emperor founded Karlovy Vary after his hunting party discovered the hot springs near Loket — the very castle where, as a small child, he had once been held prisoner by his own father. Centuries later Johann Wolfgang von Goethe fell in love with the same landscape, returning to Karlovy Vary thirteen times and sketching Loket as a work of art to be admired from every side. Both towns belong to the historic Egerland region of Western Bohemia, and travelling between them you follow in the footsteps of an emperor and a poet.

The story of Karlovy Vary

Legend says Emperor Charles IV discovered the hot springs while hunting deer in the forests around Loket — his hounds chased the game into a steaming pool, and the waters healed the emperor's tired leg. On 14 August 1370 he granted the settlement the privileges of a free royal town, and it took his name: Karlovy Vary, "Charles' Baths." The town grew around its thermal springs into the most fashionable spa in Europe.

There are thirteen main hot springs here and around three hundred smaller seeps, with temperatures ranging from about 30°C to a scalding 73.4°C. The most dramatic is the Vřídlo geyser, which gushes around 2,000 litres a minute and jets boiling mineral water almost twelve metres into the air. Spa guests still stroll the grand colonnades sipping the waters from porcelain cups — the Mill Colonnade, designed by Josef Zítek (architect of Prague's National Theatre) and built between 1871 and 1881, is the most magnificent, its 132-metre promenade carried on 124 Corinthian columns beneath twelve statues for the months of the year.

For centuries the town drew the famous and the powerful: Goethe came thirteen times, while Beethoven, Chopin, Peter the Great, Tolstoy, Karl Marx and Casanova all took the cure. Becherovka, the herbal liqueur invented here by pharmacist Josef Becher in 1807, is nicknamed the "thirteenth spring." In 2021 Karlovy Vary was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as one of the eleven Great Spa Towns of Europe.

The story of Loket Castle

Loket Castle rises on a granite promontory above the Ohře River, which loops so sharply around it that the town took the Czech name for "elbow" — Loket (in German, Elbogen). Founded in the late 12th century and first recorded in 1234, it is one of the oldest stone castles in the Czech lands. Thick walls and the river on three sides earned it the nickname "the Impregnable Castle of Bohemia."