A Day Trip to the Czech Far West

July 12, 2023

During my brief stay at home this summer – which I have informally dubbed my Eurosummer – my sister’s endless badgering led us to undertake exactly one domestic trip. Her desired destination was Loket Castle, a sight that lies about an hour and a half west of Prague. Situated on a peninsula within the bend of the Ohře River, Loket can only be approached by a series of narrow winding paths that lead to the centrally located Masaryk Square. Scarcity means that parking is limited to two hours, so we had to strategically plan lunch around feeding cash into the parking meter.

The interior of Loket Castle is relatively standard for a Central European castle: there are a few decorated halls, a lookout tower, and of course a torture chamber. As many other places in Western Bohemia, the castle is associated with Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who even contributed a few items to its mineral collection. The one thing that sets Loket apart from other Czech castles is that it houses a fifteen-kilogramme meteorite fragment, which was documented as early as the seventeenth century. Back then, it weighed over a hundred kilogrammes, but it was cut up in the seventeenth century and its fragments were sent to museums around Europe.

After lunch, we drove across the river and made a quick climb to a lookout over the town. The sun had come out by then and the castle, bathed in golden light, stood proudly at the highest point of the city. We then began our drive again, our next destination being Jáchymov.

With its mining cultural landscape inscribed on the UNESCO list of world heritage, Jáchymov is in equal parts interesting, historically significant, and bizarre. Before parking our car at Tunnel Number 1, we drove past the mine Svornost, the oldest European mine still in operation. Opened in 1525, Svornost was used for centuries to excavate silver, but in 1853 it became the first uranium mine in the world; in fact, it was material from Jáchymov in which the Curies first discovered polonium and radium. Svornost also supplies the world’s first radon spa with radon-rich water.

We did not tour Svornost or Tunnel Number 1. From what we could tell, Svornost is not open to visitors, while Tunnel Number 1 operates on a rigid and somewhat inconvenient hourly schedule. We did, however, see the outsides of both mines, accidentally trespassing our way to the very opening of the Tunnel Number 1 opening. The mine there was predominantly used to mine silver and, in later years, uranium. Indeed, the whole town of Jáchymov is known for its silver and its short-lived silver mint, the quality of which ensured the fame of the taler, a coin whose name would come to be adopted by numerous countries including the United States.

We ended our trip with a brief visit to Karlovy Vary, a spa town of which I have already written on this blog. Climbing down the hill to Park Colonnade, we walked along the promenade to reach Mill Colonnade before turning back again. We got home around dinnertime.