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The story of Grandhotel Pupp

Grandhotel Pupp

If this grand facade looks familiar, you may have seen it in the cinema: it played the Hotel Splendide in Montenegro in the 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale, and it has been cited as an inspiration for The Grand Budapest Hotel. The story begins with a sweet tooth.

In 1760 a confectioner named Jan Jiří Pop arrived in Karlsbad and worked for a local confectioner, Mitterbach. In 1775 he married Mitterbach's daughter, who had bought a share of the Bohemia Hall, and soon the family owned the whole hall; around then he began using the German form of his name, Pupp.

The family prospered, bought the neighbouring Saxony Hall in 1890, and between 1896 and 1907 the Viennese architects Fellner & Helmer rebuilt everything into today's neo-Baroque palace. After the war the hotel was nationalised and in 1950 renamed Grandhotel Moskva; its old name returned in 1989. Every year it hosts the Karlovy Vary film festival.

This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗

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