Grandhotel Pupp

Where it sits. The Grandhotel Pupp stands at the upper end of the spa valley in Karlovy Vary, in the far west of Bohemia, where the Teplá river runs down a narrow wooded gorge before joining the Ohře. The town is roughly 130 kilometres west of Prague and 50 from the German border. The hotel closes the head of the promenade: from its front steps the pedestrian spa district runs downhill past the colonnades, and behind it the beech woods of the Slavkov Forest climb steeply, with the Diana lookout tower reached by a funicular that starts almost at the hotel's back door. The building is a neo-Baroque block of pale render and cream stone with a mansard roof, and at around 228 rooms it dominates its end of the valley the way a nineteenth-century opera house dominates a square.

The story behind it. The hotel traces itself to 1701, when a ballroom called the Saxon Hall was built on the site for the spa's growing summer society. Johann Georg Pupp, a Bavarian-born confectioner who had come to Karlovy Vary to work, married into a local family and from 1775 began acquiring shares in that hall and its neighbour, the Bohemian Hall. His descendants spent a century consolidating the plots, and between 1893 and 1907 the family commissioned the Viennese practice of Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Helmer — the firm behind dozens of Central European theatres and the town's own Market Colonnade and Imperial Spa — to replace the accumulated buildings with a single grand hotel. Nationalised in 1951, it spent nearly four decades as the Grandhotel Moskva before reverting to the family name after 1989. Since 1946 it has been the operational centre of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival each July, which is why its lobby appears in more European film-industry photographs than almost any other hotel in the region.

On screen. In Casino Royale (2006) the Grandhotel Pupp plays the Hotel Splendide, the establishment in the fictional Montenegrin resort where Bond and Vesper Lynd stay while Bond takes on Le Chiffre at the poker table. The arrival, the reception desk, the grand staircase and the corridors are the real hotel; production designer Peter Lamont's unit dressed rather than rebuilt them. The casino itself, in the same film, is a different Karlovy Vary building: the exterior of the Casino Royale is the Imperial Spa, the Lázně I bathhouse of 1893 to 1895, also by Fellner and Helmer, standing a few hundred metres down the valley, while the gaming-room interiors were built at Barrandov Studios in Prague. The Montenegrin street scenes were shot at Loket, a small castle town 11 kilometres away. The hotel had a second 2006 outing in Last Holiday, where it plays itself, and that film's exteriors and interiors give a fuller tour of the building than Bond does.

What you actually see today. The public rooms are the point, and non-residents can see most of them by booking a table. The Grandrestaurant occupies a mirrored, chandeliered hall with a gallery, and the Café Pupp on the ground floor has served the spa promenade for generations; the Becher's Bar in the cellar is named for the local herbal liqueur. Below the hotel the spa district runs downhill through the colonnades: Josef Zítek's cast-iron and stone Mill Colonnade of 1871 to 1881, 132 metres long on 124 Corinthian columns and covering five springs, and the modern Hot Spring Colonnade where the Vřídlo geyser fires a jet of 73-degree mineral water some twelve metres into the air. Karlovy Vary was inscribed with the other Great Spa Towns of Europe on the UNESCO list in 2021. The local ritual is worth joining: buy a porcelain drinking cup with a flat handle spout from any kiosk, fill it at the springs, which range from about 30 to 73 degrees and taste progressively more mineral as they get hotter, and walk the colonnades between sips. The town's other exports are all within a few streets — Becherovka, the herbal liqueur blended here since 1807, Moser cut glass, made in the city since 1857, and the round spa wafers sold hot from presses along the promenade.

Getting there and timing. Buses from Prague's Florenc station take just over two hours and are more frequent and faster than the train, which takes over three; Karlovy Vary has a small international airport with seasonal services. May, June and September are the best months, with the spa gardens in leaf and the valley walks open. The first week of July is festival week, when rooms in the town sell out entirely and the Pupp is effectively a film-industry compound. Winter is quiet, damp and often foggy in the gorge, but the thermal treatments and the colonnades work regardless of weather. Rates here sit firmly at the top of the local market.