Prague
A thousand years left standing
Prague came through the twentieth century largely intact, and that single fact shapes everything you see. Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau and Cubist fronts stand shoulder to shoulder on the same street because nothing ever forced the city to start over. A castle runs the length of the ridge, a stone bridge crosses the river below it, and the Old Town lanes still follow their medieval lines. Harder to photograph is the other Prague — the beer halls, the river steps, the parks on the hills — which is where the city goes once the day-trippers have gone home.
A fortified seat went up on the castle ridge around 880, and Prague grew as the capital of Bohemia beneath it. Its high point came under Charles IV, crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, who turned the city into an imperial capital and gave it a new town, a university and a stone bridge. Religious conflict followed: the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century, then the revolt that began with a defenestration at the castle in 1618 and grew into the Thirty Years' War. Bohemia lost, and for nearly three hundred years Prague was a provincial Habsburg city where German was the language of business. The Czech revival of the nineteenth century rebuilt the culture deliberately — a national theatre paid for by public subscription, a national museum, a national cemetery. Czechoslovakia was declared in 1918, occupied in 1939, and spent four decades after 1948 under communist rule, which ended in November 1989. What makes the city unusual is the physical continuity: almost none of this was demolished.
Two days cover the castle, the bridge, the Old Town and Josefov. Four let you cross the river without a plan, climb Petřín or Vyšehrad, and give an evening to a beer hall.
Feel the city
The intangible side — what you remember after
Top experiences
If you do nothing else, do these — in order
- 15
Ride a tram across the river at night with no destinationPrague's red trams run all night on a separate network, and the routes over the bridges give you the castle floodlit, the embankments empty and the Old Town seen from the outside. Nobody checks where you are going and it takes as long as you let it.
Places
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Historic & landmarks 8
Mosques & churches 1
Waterfront & islands 1
Museums & galleries 1
Streets & nightlife 2
Viewpoints & parks 2
Local quarters 1
Beyond the city
Bohemia is small. The sandstone rock country, the spa towns and the castle-topped ridges south of the city all sit within a couple of hours of the river.
Know before you go
The practical side
May and September are the balance: long light, open gardens, and the Old Town still walkable. July and August are hot and full. December brings the markets and short grey days; January and February are cold and genuinely quiet.
A short dobrý den when you walk into a shop and na shledanou when you leave counts for more than a full sentence of Czech. Tables in pubs are shared. Look people in the eye when you toast, and keep your voice down on trams — Czechs do.
The exchange booths on the tourist streets are the city's oldest trick: the big number on the board applies only to large sums, and the rest goes in fees. Street-hailed taxis have the same reputation. Neither is dangerous — Prague is a safe city to walk at night.
The Czech koruna, not the euro, although tourist-area menus quote both and paying in euros is always the worse rate. Cards work almost everywhere, pubs included, but small change is still useful at market stalls and for what you leave on the table.