Loket

A gothic castle town wrapped in a loop of the Ohře — "the elbow" that gave it its name — with a romanesque-gothic royal castle, Goethe memories and one perfect huddle of roofs.

Loket means “elbow”, and the map explains the name: the Ohře bends almost completely around the granite crag, and the town fills the loop — a single huddle of roofs under a royal castle that guarded the road into Bohemia from the 12th century. The castle keeps its romanesque rotunda-fragment and gothic towers, and the town below keeps its scale: one square, a brewery in the old town hall, and walls dropping straight to the river. Goethe stayed and celebrated a birthday here, one of many spa-era admirers. Trails run straight from the bridge — downstream through the granite gorge toward Karlovy Vary (the Svatošské skály), upstream into the Slavkovský les.