The historic town centre is well preserved and is protected by law as an urban monument reservation.

Cheb consists of 19 municipal parts (in brackets population according to the 2021 census):[2] The first name of the town, documented in 1061, was Egire.

[4] Cheb is located about 38 kilometres (24 mi) southwest of Karlovy Vary, on the border with Germany.

The earliest settlement in the area was a Slavic gord at what is now known as the Cheb Castle complex, north of the town centre.

[10] In 807 the district of today's Cheb was included in the new margraviate of East Franconia, which belonged at first to the Babenbergs, but from 906 to the margraves (marquis) of Vohburg.

King Wenceslaus II of Bohemia held the town in 1291–1304, then Albert I of Germany acquired the region.

It wasn't until 1322 that Cheb became a permanent part of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown, when King John of Bohemia acquired it from Emperor Louis IV.

[13] In the 15th century, Cheb was one of the largest and wealthiest towns of Kingdom of Bohemia with 7,300 inhabitants.

The northern part of the old town was devastated by a large fire in 1809, and many middle-age buildings were destroyed.

[15] The terms of the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye triggered civil unrest between the Sudeten German population and the new First Czechoslovak Republic, just as in the rest of the Sudetenland.

[12] During the Sudeten Crisis, the town was occupied by the Nazi German-sponsored Sudetendeutsches Freikorps paramilitary group.

[16] On 3 October 1938, the town was visited by Adolf Hitler; shortly afterward Wehrmacht troops marched into the Sudetenland and seized control.

[17] Cheb was liberated by the 97th Infantry Division of the United States Army on 25 April 1945.

After World War II, due to the expulsion of ethnic Germans and resettlement of Czechs, the population significantly dropped.

After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the Vietnamese community gradually established seven markets here, and even customers from Germany came to Cheb for cheap goods.

The town lies on the railway line of national importance from Františkovy Lázně to Plzeň, Prague, Olomouc and Ostrava.

[25] Cheb Airport is located 3 kilometres (2 mi) east of the town centre.

Two faculties of the University of West Bohemia, pedagogical and economic, have a detached workplace in Cheb and open study programs there.

Its predecessor was the club FC Union Cheb, which played in the Czechoslovak and Czech First League from 1979 to 1996, but then was abolished due to financial reasons.

[30] On the rock in the northwest of the historic town centre lies Cheb Castle.

Although the castle is mostly a ruin, the torso of the palace, the defensive Black Tower and the Chapel of Saints Martin Erhard and Ursula.

When the house was owned by magistrate councillor Grüner in the first half of the 19th century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe frequently spent time here.

It was established as a three-naved Romanesque basilica in the 1220s, of which the western portal and the lower part of the tower remain in place.

After the fire of 1742, the tower was rebuilt with a Baroque cupola, according to the design of the indigenous architect Balthasar Neumann.

The top of the twin steeples were destroyed by bombardment at the end of World War II and restored in summer 2008.