Grandhotel Pupp

Grandhotel Pupp traces its origins to 1701, when the first building on its site in the Bohemian spa town of Karlovy Vary opened as a banquet hall for visitors taking the town's mineral waters. The confectioner Johann Georg Pupp acquired an interest in the establishment in 1775, and his family expanded it steadily over the following century, giving the hotel its present name and building the grand Neo-Baroque wings, with their ornate stucco facades and mansard roofs, that were largely completed by the early twentieth century. The hotel became one of the leading resorts of Central European high society through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hosting aristocrats, composers and writers who traveled to Karlovy Vary for its thermal springs. Nationalized under Czechoslovakia's communist government after 1945, the hotel was renamed for a period before being restored to something closer to its historic name and character after 1989. Its grand ballroom and facades have also served repeatedly as a filming location for international productions drawn to its intact period grandeur.