Where brides walk — a photo guide to wedding locations in Mariánské Lázně

The whole wedding day fits into a ten-minute walk here.

It is half past eight in the morning and the colonnade is almost empty. The spa guests have finished their first cup and gone to their treatments; the next wave will not arrive until eleven. In between there is an hour and a half in which a hundred and twenty metres of cast-iron arcade belong to a single couple — and to a photographer who knows this light will not come round again.

This article is not a how-to; for that there is the planning guide and the overview of venues, halls and capacities. This is a walk through the places as they look — in the order a wedding day usually takes them. It starts, though, before anyone steps outside.

The morning at the hotel

Before anyone goes outside, there are still a few unhurried hours. The dress hangs in the window recess, the rings wait in their box, and the hotel is quieter now than it will be for the rest of the day.

The groom has a programme of his own meanwhile. The hotel bar tends to be the first place the groomsmen gather — and the last quiet moment before the rest of the day gets going.

The Main Colonnade

From the square in front of the fountain you see the whole of it at once: a hundred and twenty metres of glazed arcade with a yellow domed portal at the end. Most wedding pictures are made inside, but this is the one frame that shows how long the colonnade actually is.

The cast-iron structure of 1889 was cast in Blansko and bolted together on site like a kit. The ceiling is painted, the floor polished to a mirror, and between the columns the light falls in regular stripes — which is why people photograph here even when the wedding itself is somewhere else.

The colonnade is public space; nobody will close it off for you alone. That sounds like a drawback, but mostly it means the morning hour is free here and nobody moves you along. In the afternoon it reverses: the promenade comes alive, people walk between the columns with drinking cups, and the pictures take on an entirely different mood — livelier, less composed.

How the colonnade came about and why it looks the way it does is covered in the article on its history.

The Singing Fountain

The circular fountain lies in front of the colonnade and plays on every odd hour. The repertoire is fixed, a piece runs about ten minutes, and after dark the lights join in. For a wedding this has one practical quality: it is the only item on the programme you can plan to the minute without having to book it.

The whole wedding day fits into a ten-minute walk here.

From the ceremony to the banquet and on to the hotel

The fountain stands right beside our colonnade, so a special piece at a time of your choosing is settled directly with us — the fountain is run by the town, but we handle the arrangement. More on how the fountain came about and what it plays is in a separate article.

The Cross Spring pavilion and the park

A few hundred metres from the colonnade stands a white pavilion with a copper dome. Lawn in front of it, forest behind — and between them enough room for a small ceremony, after which you walk to the banquet.

White columns have the property of throwing light back into faces. Photographically that means soft shadows even at midday, when the sun is unusable anywhere else — which is why people come here at precisely the hour nobody else would choose.

The steps up to the church

From the Cross Spring a flight of steps runs up to the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The Neo-Byzantine building of 1844–1848 is visible from well down in the park, and in spring the bank beneath it turns violet — a colour nobody would dare put into the flowers.

It is the only spot in the centre where the colonnade, the church and the park in flower all fit into a single frame. The price is the stairs: in wedding shoes nobody climbs them twice, so you come once and take your time.

The end of the colonnade and the fresco

The colonnade ends in a flight of steps beneath a ceiling fresco. It is the darkest corner of the whole walkway and at the same time the only place where the background tells a story of its own rather than simply being architecture.

Indoors: the Marble Hall

In town, the banquet most often takes place in the Casino social house. The Marble Hall has a frescoed ceiling, crystal chandeliers and a parquet floor that has been danced on since 1900 — and it is the only one that fits a wedding you do not have to trim.

Capacities for each hall — from fifty in Edward's Library to three hundred seated in the Marble Hall — are in the table on the weddings page.

Outdoors and in the green

Not every ceremony happens in town. When it is to be in the open, you look for a meadow, a pavilion or the edge of a wood — and the mood is entirely different: less architecture, more grass and trees.

An outdoor ceremony is always planned with a hall in reserve, though. In a basin at six hundred and thirty metres it rains in June too, and the decision is made on the morning itself — which is why it pays to design the flowers so they can be carried indoors.

What follows from it

No two places in this article are more than a ten-minute walk apart. That is not a tourist statistic but a practical one: it means nobody has to be driven anywhere between ceremony and banquet, that guests can stretch their legs in the meantime, and that the photographer does not spend half the day in transit.

The rest — dates, capacities, who rents out what, and what needs settling before everything else — is on the weddings page.

See Ensana Nové Lázně

1

2

3

What concerns you?

MusculoskeletalRespiratoryDigestive & MetabolicCardiovascularKidney & UrinaryStress & BurnoutSkin ConditionsRehabilitation

Next