A Slow Week in the Forgotten West of Czechia: Seven Days in the Slavkov Forest and Beyond

A Slow Week in the Forgotten West of Czechia: Seven Days in the Slavkov Forest and Beyond

There are places that tourists overlook.

And then there are places that history itself seems to have forgotten.

The countryside between Plzeň, Karlovy Vary and Mariánské Lázně belongs to the second category. Look at a map and you may wonder why you have never heard of it. There are medieval monasteries, tiny Baroque towns, Celtic fortifications, romantic castle ruins, mineral springs and some of the wildest countryside in Czechia.

And remarkably few people.

There are reasons for that. This was predominantly German-speaking country before the Second World War. After 1945, much of its population disappeared through expulsion. Villages emptied. Then part of the Slavkov Forest became a military training area. Settlements vanished altogether. Uran mining brought another strange chapter. Roads remained minor, no major city grew nearby and the modern tourist industry largely passed the region by.

The result is not an untouched wilderness. It is something more complicated – a landscape from which layers of human life have been removed.

Make Bečov nad Teplou your home for the week. Not simply the first stop on an itinerary, but home. Unpack once. Every morning you will leave in a different direction; every evening you will return through the forests to the same little town.

After a few days, something changes. You know where to have dinner. The square looks familiar in the evening. You have a favourite walk before bed.

That is when slow travel begins to work.

Forget about motorways. And prepare to discover a corner of Czechia where getting slightly lost may actually be part of the experience.

Day 1 – Bečov and a Treasure Hidden Beneath the Floor

Start without driving anywhere.

Bečov nad Teplou is exactly the sort of town this journey is about: beautiful enough to be famous, remote enough not to be.

Above its small historic centre rises a remarkable complex of medieval castle and later château. But Bečov's greatest treasure spent forty years underground.

The Reliquary of St Maurus is one of the most valuable medieval objects in Czechia, comparable in importance to the Czech Crown Jewels. Made in the 13th century for an abbey in what is now Belgium, it eventually came into the possession of the Beaufort-Spontin family, owners of Bečov.

When the family left Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, the reliquary disappeared.

Decades later, an American businessman approached the communist authorities with a peculiar offer. He wanted to buy an unidentified historical object hidden somewhere in Czechoslovakia. He would not say exactly what it was or where it was hidden.

Czechoslovak investigators began putting the clues together.

In November 1985 they found the reliquary buried beneath the floor of Bečov's castle chapel, where it had been concealed forty years earlier. With it was another treasure: bottles of old wine and cognac.

After years of restoration, St Maurus returned to Bečov.

Spend the rest of your first day walking through the little town and along the Teplá valley. Find somewhere you like for dinner.

There is no need to go anywhere else.

You live here now.

At least for a week.

Day 2 – Into the Slavkov Forest

Today, disappear into the landscape that gives this journey its character.

The Slavkov Forest is not dramatic in the Alpine sense. Its magic is quieter: extensive forests, peat bogs, mineral springs, wet meadows and empty uplands where the next village can feel surprisingly far away.

Begin at Kladská. A short wooden walkway leads through peatland, dark water and spruce forest, while an improbable collection of Alpine-style timber houses makes the tiny settlement look as though somebody misplaced a corner of Tyrol.

Then leave the more familiar trails behind.

Continue towards Tři křížky – the Three Crosses. Three stone crosses stand on a bare hill above an extraordinary open landscape. Legends explain them in different ways: one speaks of plague, another of three young men who sold their souls to the devil.

The real treasure is the landscape itself.

Nearby lies the Upolínová louka, a protected meadow crossed by a wooden walkway, while the surrounding plateau gives you the first real sense of how empty this region can become.

Don't try to fill the afternoon with attractions.

Walk.

This landscape needs space.

And in the evening, follow the small roads back through the forest to Bečov.

Yesterday it was where you happened to be staying.

Tonight it already feels slightly different.

Day 3 – The Town That Disappeared

Today is the most important day of the week for understanding where you are.

Head into the Slavkov Forest again, this time towards Čistá, formerly known as Litrbachy.

Do not expect a picturesque abandoned village with ivy growing through windows.

The town is gone.

Before the war it was a small, predominantly German-speaking mining town. After the expulsion of its German population, it found itself inside the new military training area. Empty buildings became targets for live-fire exercises. The Czechoslovak army even used the town while making a military training film about combat in a settlement.

Eventually, bulldozers finished what artillery and abandonment had begun.

A town disappeared from the map.

Čistá was not alone. Across this part of western Bohemia, villages, churches, cemeteries, roadside crosses and centuries of local memory vanished or were badly damaged.

Not far away, Jeroným Mine reveals another layer of the same landscape.

Tin was mined around the Slavkov Forest for centuries. Underground at Jeroným, old workings preserve spaces excavated with techniques that now seem almost impossibly laborious.

It changes your understanding of the forest above.

This apparent wilderness is full of human history: mines beneath the hills, water channels through the woods, foundations beneath grass and old roads leading towards villages that no longer exist.

The tragic history of the 20th century had an unintended consequence. Large areas escaped the suburban development, intensive recreation and tourist infrastructure that transformed other Czech landscapes.

Nature returned.

Spend part of the day simply walking.

It would be too simple to call this wilderness. People lived here, farmed here, prayed here and buried their dead here.

Perhaps "emptiness" is a better word.

And once you know what used to fill that emptiness, the landscape looks different.

Then return to Bečov.

By now you no longer need to study the town map.

Day 4 – Teplá, Úterý, Gutštejn and a Spa Afternoon

Today make a broad loop south of Bečov.

Begin at Teplá Monastery, one of the great monastic landscapes of western Bohemia.

The Premonstratensian monastery has survived wars, fires, political upheavals and suppression. Its great library alone would justify the journey, but take time to walk around the complex rather than rushing through a guided tour and leaving.

Then continue to Úterý.

Its name literally means "Tuesday", supposedly connected with the day on which markets were traditionally held. It is the sort of tiny Czech town that seems almost absurdly beautiful for somewhere so little known: a sloping square, Baroque houses, a church and streets that quickly dissolve into countryside.

From here continue towards the valley of the Hadovka and Gutštejn.

Hidden among the trees above the stream is one of the most romantic castle ruins in western Bohemia. Gutštejn was founded around 1300 and eventually became associated with a powerful noble family whose later members acquired a less respectable reputation as raiders and kidnappers.

Follow the path through the wooded valley and suddenly the great tower appears between the trees.

There is no ticket office, no souvenir shop and usually hardly anyone around.

You simply walk into the ruins.

Take your time. Explore the walls, sit in the grass beneath the tower and listen to the stream below. Movement around the ruin is at your own risk – worth remembering on wet stones and steep edges – but that lack of visitor infrastructure is also part of Gutštejn's extraordinary charm.

This is almost the definition of a Hidden Gem: beautiful, atmospheric and somehow still overlooked.

And now do something completely different.

Continue to Konstantinovy Lázně, one of Czechia's smallest spa towns.

Walk through the spa park. Drink coffee. Try the mineral water. Book a treatment if you feel like it.

Or do absolutely nothing.

Then drive home to Bečov.

After a monastery, a tiny Baroque town and a ruined castle in the woods, an hour spent doing nothing in a spa park is not wasted time.

That is what slow travel is supposed to allow.

Day 5 – Ghosts, Czechia's Tiny Town and the Mountain of the Celts

Drive north-east today through some of the emptiest countryside of the week.

Your first stop is Luková.

From outside, the abandoned-looking Church of St George appears to be another casualty of the depopulation of the borderlands.

Then you look inside.

White figures sit silently in the pews.

Artist Jakub Hadrava filled the church with ghostly plaster figures, transforming a decaying village church into one of Czechia's most haunting art installations. The ghosts are not a cheap horror attraction. In this landscape they inevitably evoke the people who once filled churches like this and are no longer here.

Continue to Rabštejn nad Střelou.

Calling Rabštejn a town feels almost comic today. Around twenty permanent residents live in a place that once possessed town rights, a castle, monastery, church, bridge and tightly packed historical centre above the beautiful Střela valley.

It has long been promoted as Czechia's smallest historical town.

Don't rush through it.

Walk down towards the river, cross the old bridge and climb back slowly. Rabštejn is not impressive because it is large.

It is impressive because something so small can contain so much history.

Then turn north-west towards Vladař.

The broad, isolated volcanic hill dominates the surrounding countryside and once carried an important fortified settlement associated with the Celtic world. Today there are no reconstructed Celtic huts, souvenir stalls or men dressed as druids.

Good.

Climb through the quiet landscape and imagine the hill when its ramparts enclosed a major prehistoric centre.

Then come back down.

The mountain has survived perfectly well without a visitor centre.

The road back to Bečov completes the day's loop. And there is something satisfying now about seeing the castle appear above the town again.

You have been somewhere completely different.

But you have come home.

Day 6 – Potvorov, Plasy and an Architectural Miracle

Head east for the longest excursion of the week, devoted to two very different expressions of faith.

Begin in Potvorov, where an extraordinary Romanesque church stands in a tiny village.

The Church of St Nicholas is the kind of building that can easily be overlooked precisely because it is not surrounded by a famous historic town. Its heavy Romanesque masonry has survived for more than eight centuries.

Stand beside it for a while before continuing to Plasy.

Here everything changes scale.

The former Cistercian monastery is one of the great Baroque complexes of Czechia, associated with the brilliant architect Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel.

But its most astonishing feature is underneath you.

The enormous convent was built on marshy ground and rests on thousands of wooden piles. A sophisticated system keeps them permanently submerged. If the water disappeared and the timber dried out, the foundations themselves could be endangered.

The monks understood water. Santini understood architecture.

Together they created a building that in a very literal sense survives because water continues to flow beneath it.

After several days of ruined castles, vanished villages and empty countryside, Plasy provides an unexpected counterpoint.

Some things disappeared.

Some survived because generations of people understood exactly how to keep them alive.

Then turn west.

It is a longer drive back than on most days, but there is no reason to hurry. The landscape slowly empties again as you leave the Plzeň basin behind.

And eventually there is Bečov.

Same room. Same square. Perhaps even the same table for dinner.

After six days, repetition has become one of the pleasures of the journey.

Day 7 – Nowhere You Have to Be

Do not spend your final day collecting the places you missed.

Go back into the Slavkov Forest.

Choose a longer walking trail. Return to Kladská early in the morning before other visitors arrive. Walk somewhere around the empty uplands. Follow a forest track simply because you want to know where it goes.

Or return to the place that stayed in your mind during the week.

Perhaps it was Tři křížky.

Perhaps the silence around Čistá.

Perhaps you would rather stay in Bečov, walk beside the Teplá and have a long lunch.

There is no correct choice.

Seven days earlier, this part of western Bohemia may have looked like an empty patch on the map between better-known destinations.

Now you know differently.

There are grand monuments here, but they are not what makes the region extraordinary. It is the combination of things: a medieval treasure buried beneath a chapel, a Romanesque church in an almost unknown village, ghosts sitting in abandoned pews, a monastery resting on water, forests growing where communities disappeared, and a ruined castle hiding above a stream.

And there is something else.

You now know the road back to Bečov.

You recognise the turn into town. The castle above the valley no longer announces another attraction. It tells you that the day's journey is over.

For one week, this little town became home.

That is the difference between passing through a landscape and staying in it.

This is not the Czechia of bucket lists.

It is not conveniently arranged around famous cities or connected by tourist buses. Sometimes you will drive for a surprisingly long time without seeing anything that resembles an attraction.

That is precisely the point.

There are still parts of Europe where the map seems to contain blank spaces.

The blank spaces are rarely empty.

You just have to stay long enough to begin seeing what is there.

Continue your journey through Czechia

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