Loket

Where it sits. Loket is a town of about 3,000 people in the Sokolov district of the Karlovy Vary Region, in the far west of Bohemia, some 11 kilometres from the spa town of Karlovy Vary and 130 from Prague. It occupies a granite spur inside a tight meander of the Ohře river, which loops almost the whole way around the rock before doubling back. That shape gives the place its name in both languages: Loket means elbow in Czech, as does the German Elbogen. The result is a defensive site of almost diagrammatic clarity — a castle on the neck of the spur, a single small square behind it, and steep wooded slopes falling to the river on three sides. Approach from the Karlovy Vary road and the whole town appears at once, stacked above the water.

The story behind it. Loket Castle was founded around the turn of the thirteenth century as a royal border stronghold guarding the route into the Egerland, and its Romanesque rotunda is among the oldest surviving structures of its kind in Bohemia. The Gothic castle grew around it, was pledged and traded through the medieval period, and from 1788 to 1949 served as a prison, an unglamorous function that is much of the reason it survived. The town below is a compact grid of burgher houses around the square now named for T. G. Masaryk, with a Holy Trinity plague column of 1719 at its centre and the Baroque church of St Wenceslas rebuilt in the 1730s. Goethe was a repeated visitor during his Bohemian spa summers, staying at the White Horse inn on the square and spending his seventy-fourth birthday here in 1823; the castle museum keeps a room on the connection. Loket also gave its name to a porcelain works founded in 1815, one of the oldest in the Czech lands.

On screen. Loket is the third of Casino Royale's Czech locations, and the one that stands in for another country outright. When Bond and Vesper Lynd arrive by train in Montenegro, the town they step into is Loket. The station scene, the walk up into the centre, the streets down which the Aston Martin DBS is driven and the square where the two of them argue over the mission were all shot here in 2006, with signage and dressing converted to a fictional Montenegrin resort. The film then cuts between Loket's streets and two buildings in Karlovy Vary: the Grandhotel Pupp as the exterior and public rooms of the Hotel Splendide, and the Imperial Spa bathhouse as the exterior of the Casino Royale, with the poker-room interiors built at Barrandov Studios in Prague. Nothing in the finished sequence is in Montenegro at all, and retracing it here is straightforward because the square is barely 80 metres across and essentially unaltered.

What you actually see today. The castle is open as a museum, with the rotunda, a tower climb over the roofs and the river bend, a collection of Loket and regional porcelain, a torture-instrument display in the cellars, and the famous local curiosity known as the cursed burgrave — a large iron meteorite, weighing over 100 kilograms, that fell in the region and was long believed to be a petrified nobleman. Below the walls an open-air amphitheatre stages summer concerts and opera in a natural bowl beside the water. The square keeps its Baroque and Empire fronts and a handful of cafes, and a walking route follows the Ohře downstream through the Svatošské skály, a spectacular group of weathered granite pillars about six kilometres away, reachable on foot or by canoe. The Ohře through this stretch is a popular beginner's paddling river, with rental operators in Loket and Karlovy Vary running the section between the two towns in an easy half-day. From the far bank, the classic view of Loket lines up the castle, the church tower and the tiled roofs above a wall of grey rock, and it is the shot that appears on almost every regional poster — early morning and late afternoon both work, since the spur catches light from two sides.

Getting there and timing. Regional trains from Karlovy Vary reach the station below the town in about 20 minutes, and buses run from Karlovy Vary and Sokolov; by car it is a 15-minute drive from Karlovy Vary. From Prague, allow two and a half hours by bus and a change. May to September is the practical season, with the amphitheatre programme running through the summer and the river valley at its greenest; the castle stays open year-round with shorter winter hours. Half a day is enough for the town itself, which pairs naturally with Karlovy Vary in the same trip. The streets are cobbled and steep in places, and the castle involves stairs throughout, so mobility is genuinely restricted.