Spa colonnade and town, Karlovy Vary, Czechoslovakia, 1959

About this postcard

A view from above over the hot-spring spa town of Karlovy Vary: a long arcaded colonnade with a promenade and strolling figures runs through the center, flanked by dense trees. Multi-story gabled and mansard-roofed buildings climb a wooded hillside on the left, with more townscape and distant hills under a cloudy sky to the right. Karlovy Vary, known in German as Karlsbad, made its name in the 19th century as a fashionable European watering place, and its covered colonnades, built to shelter patients taking the mineral springs, remained the center of spa life. The sender was an American on a multi-country tour that included Prague, writing to Detroit in the summer of 1959, when Czechoslovakia lay behind the Iron Curtain.