Prague has about 1.3 million people and the historic core is small enough to cross on foot in half an hour. It is also one of the most visited cities in Europe, and the number of annual visitors runs to several times the resident population.
That ratio is the defining fact of the place, and everything practical about visiting follows from it.
The shape
The Vltava runs north through the city in a series of bends, and Prague is built on both banks and the hills either side.
The right bank, east — Staré Město (the Old Town), Josefov (the Jewish Quarter) and Nové Město (the New Town, founded 1348, so new is relative). Flat, dense, medieval street plan.
The left bank, west — Malá Strana below the castle, and Hradčany above it. Steep, baroque.
Charles Bridge joins them, and it is the reason the crowd distributes itself the way it does.
The districts are numbered — Praha 1 to 22 — and the numbers are used constantly. Praha 1 is the historic centre; 2 is Vinohrady and Nové Město’s southern end; 3 is Žižkov; 7 is Holešovice and Letná.
Beyond the centre, the city becomes nineteenth-century apartment blocks and then, further out, the paneláky — prefabricated concrete housing estates from the 1960s to 80s, where a large share of Praguers actually live.
Never bombed
The single most important fact about how Prague looks. It escaped serious damage in the Second World War — there was an accidental American raid in February 1945 and heavy fighting in the Prague Uprising in May, which destroyed the north wing of the Old Town Hall, but the city was not systematically bombed.
So the medieval street plan, the Gothic, the baroque and the Art Nouveau are all standing together, in a way that Warsaw, Dresden and Berlin are not.
The communist period then neglected it for forty years, which sounds bad and preserved it — there was no money for redevelopment, so nothing was knocked down and replaced with something worse.
Language
Czech, a West Slavic language with seven cases, and a reputation for consonant clusters that is largely deserved — strč prst skrz krk is a real sentence meaning “stick a finger through your throat”, with no vowels in it.
English is widely spoken in the centre and in the service industry, less so outside it and among older people, where German or Russian may be more likely. A few words are appreciated out of proportion: dobrý den (hello), děkuji (thank you), prosím (please, and also “you’re welcome” and “pardon?”), na shledanou (goodbye).
The climate
Continental. Cold winters, warm summers, and a genuine spring and autumn.
Winter goes below freezing regularly, with grey fog sitting in the river valley. Snow falls but rarely lies long in the centre.
Summer reaches the low thirties in July and August, and the heat sits in the valley. Air conditioning is not universal.
May, June, September and early October are the best months and everybody knows it.
The crowds, and the shape of a visit
The tourist load is concentrated with unusual precision: Charles Bridge, the Old Town Square, the route up to the castle, and Wenceslas Square. Step two streets off that line and the city is quiet.
That is not a complaint so much as a plan. Prague rewards early mornings, late evenings and the districts nobody has heard of — Vyšehrad, Žižkov, Holešovice, Vinohrady — more than almost any city in this network.
Money
The koruna, not the euro, and the exchange booths in the centre are a genuine trap. See what you should know.