Baroque palaces and steep lanes between the bridge and the castle, largely unchanged since 1700, and empty of people the moment you step off the main route.
What it is
The Lesser Town, founded in 1257 below the castle, burned in 1541 and rebuilt over the following two centuries by the Catholic nobility who acquired confiscated Protestant estates after 1620. That gives it an unusual consistency: it is a baroque quarter, more or less entire, on a medieval street plan.
Almost nothing has been built here since 1800. The palaces are now embassies, ministries and the Czech parliament, which is why so many of the doorways have flags and guards.
What to see
St Nicholas Church on Malostranské náměstí is the finest baroque building in Prague and one of the best in Europe — a Dientzenhofer dome and a ceiling fresco of 1,500 square metres. Mozart played the organ here and it was used at his memorial service. There is a small charge, and the tower is climbed separately.
The Wallenstein Garden, behind the palace that now houses the Senate, is free and almost nobody finds it: a formal baroque garden with a monumental loggia, a wall of artificial dripstone full of grotesque faces, bronze statues and peacocks.
The Vrtba Garden is a small terraced baroque garden climbing the hillside, one of the best of its kind anywhere.
Kampa Island, separated from the bank by the Čertovka mill stream, with a working water wheel, a park along the river and the Museum Kampa for modern Czech art.
The Lennon Wall, a graffiti wall that became a site of protest in the 1980s when western pop music was discouraged and the authorities kept painting it over. It is now repainted constantly and is a tourist stop, and the history is more interesting than what is currently on it.
Nerudova, the steep street up to the castle, with house signs from before street numbering — the Two Suns, the Golden Horseshoe, the Three Fiddles.
The trick
Malá Strana receives an enormous number of people and almost all of them walk the same 700 metres: off Charles Bridge, across Malostranské náměstí, up Nerudova, into the castle.
Step one street off that line — into Míšeňská, Tržiště, Vlašská, or down to Kampa — and the quarter empties. The buildings are the same. The crowd is not.
Eating and drinking
The main route is priced for people passing through once. Away from it:
Malostranská beseda on the square for a proper pub upstairs.
U Hrocha, a small unreconstructed Czech pub behind the square.
Café Savoy on Vítězná, a restored 1893 café with an extraordinary neo-Renaissance ceiling.
Kampa Park and the riverside restaurants for the view rather than the value.
Practical
It is steep. The climb from the bridge to the castle is a real climb, and the cobbles are uneven. The tram to the top and the walk down is the sensible order.
Both banks flood. Kampa was several metres under in 2002 and the marks are on the walls.
More Neighbourhoods
Žižkov
The pub density is the highest in the city and possibly in Europe, there is a television tower with bronze babies crawling up it, and almost no visitors come here.
Holešovice
An industrial bend in the river where Prague's contemporary art, its best market halls and a good deal of its nightlife have quietly relocated.