Mariánské Lázně

German settlers were brought into this area by the Přemyslid rulers in the 12th century, and a village called Úšovice is recorded in 1273. The springs first appear in a document of 1341, when they belonged to the Premonstratensian abbey at Teplá. They were not used for treatment until Josef Nehr, the abbey's physician, spent the years from 1779 until his death in 1820 proving their healing properties. The abbots, above all Karl Kaspar Reitenberger, then turned a marshy valley into a park of colonnades, Neoclassical spa houses and pavilions, buying the surrounding forests to protect them. The place became Marienbad, Mary's spa, after an image of the Virgin hung by a spring; it was declared a spa in 1818 and became a town in the 1860s.

The Golden Era ran from about 1870 to 1914. A railway reached the town from Cheb in 1872, new hotels and colonnades went up, and around 20,000 visitors a year came, among them rulers, celebrities and European rabbis with their Hasidic followers. Goethe stayed three times from 1820, Chopin visited, and King Edward VII opened the golf course in 1905. By the early 20th century about a million bottles of mineral water were exported each year.

After the Second World War the German-speaking majority was expelled and the town was resettled with Czechs. Under communism it was sealed off from most foreign visitors. After 1989 much of the spa quarter was restored, and in 2021 Mariánské Lázně became part of the Great Spa Towns of Europe World Heritage Site.

The spa sets the tone. Guests walk the promenades between the springs, concerts are held regularly at the colonnade during the season, and the Singing Fountain plays well-known pieces of music every odd hour. The town has its own West Bohemian Symphony Orchestra, a town theatre and an art school named after Chopin, and it holds an annual Chopin music festival.

Literature and film run through its story. Goethe spent his late love affair with the young Ulrike von Levetzow here in 1823 and named his Marienbad Elegy after the town; the house where he stayed is now the town museum. In 1946 the town hosted Czechoslovakia's first international film festival, whose later editions moved to Karlovy Vary because Mariánské Lázně could not hold the crowds. Since 2016 it has had the Marienbad Film Festival, and since 2020 a summer festival of small publishers and booksellers. Films shot here range from Music from Mars in 1955 to Army of Thieves in 2021, although Last Year at Marienbad was not filmed here.

The many nationalities of the old spa guests left churches of several denominations, including an Orthodox church built for Russian visitors and a former Anglican church. Golf and winter sports have a long tradition, and a long-track speedway circuit has hosted world championship finals.

About 14,000 people live in Mariánské Lázně. Spa care and tourism are the backbone of the economy, alongside agriculture, forestry and food production, including the spa wafers made in the town. Most of the territory lies within the Slavkov Forest protected landscape area, and the town is a railway junction on the lines from Prague to Cheb and from Plzeň to Karlovy Vary.

Life follows the rhythm of the spa season: guests fill the colonnade and parks, and local people work in the hotels, sanatoriums and services that support them. Away from the spa quarter the town is quiet and residential, with housing along the valley and the villages joined to it.

Public transport is an unusual feature for so small a town. Trams ran here from 1902 and were replaced by trolleybuses in the 1950s; eight new trolleybuses with battery power arrived in 2020, although proposals to replace them with buses keep returning in the town council.

The springs themselves are the town's signature drink. About a hundred springs rise in and around Mariánské Lázně, rich in carbon dioxide and often in iron, at around 7–10°C. The Cross Spring is strongly mineralised and laxative and was once evaporated to make a salt sold as a remedy; Rudolph's Spring is rich in calcium, Caroline's Spring in magnesium, and the waters of Ferdinand's Spring are bottled under the Excelsior label.

The sweet speciality is lázeňské oplatky, spa wafers: sweet baked wafers made in the Czech spa towns, and those made in Mariánské Lázně are very well known.

Restaurant menus follow Czech cooking: svíčková, marinated beef in a thick sauce of carrot, parsley root and celeriac with bread dumplings and cranberries; roast pork with dumplings and cabbage; smažený sýr, breaded fried cheese; and goulash soup, with local beer from the region's breweries. Fruit dumplings filled with plums, apricots or strawberries are eaten as a sweet. In the spa's heyday the town also had kosher restaurants for its many Jewish guests.