A thousand years, and barely a bomb
An independent guide to Prague — 23 landmarks, museums, parks, venues and neighborhoods, walked and written up first-hand.
The ones you came for
Prague Castle
The largest ancient castle complex in the world by area — a walled district of palaces, a cathedral, a monastery and a lane of tiny houses, not a single building.
Charles Bridge
A fourteenth-century stone bridge with thirty baroque statues, begun at 5.31am on the ninth of July 1357 because the numbers made a palindrome.
Old Town Square and the Astronomical Clock
A medieval square that survived everything, with a 600-year-old astronomical clock whose hourly show is, by common agreement, the most overrated forty seconds in Europe.
St Vitus Cathedral
Six hundred years under construction and finished in 1929, with a Mucha window, the Bohemian crown jewels behind seven locks, and Wenceslas's chapel.
Josefov, the Jewish Quarter
Six synagogues, a cemetery with twelve layers of graves, and a collection that exists because the Nazis intended to make a museum of an exterminated people.
Petřín Hill
A wooded hill above Malá Strana with orchards, a funicular, a mirror maze and a small Eiffel Tower built in 1891 by people who had just been to Paris.
Prague by category
Day-by-day itineraries
Neighborhoods
The essentials
How to get in from all three airports, how the subway and the ferries actually fit together, and the history that explains what you're standing in front of.
From the guide
1968 and 1989: Two Prague Springs
Eight months of reform ended by tanks, twenty years of enforced apathy, and eleven days in November that ended the whole thing without a shot fired.
Beer in Prague, and How to Order It
Czechs drink more beer per head than anyone on earth, the pilsner style was invented ninety kilometres away, and there is a right and a wrong way to ask for one.
Eating in Prague
Czech food is heavy, meat-forward and much better than its reputation when it is cooked properly. The problem is that most visitors only eat it where it is not.