Where To Go in Prague
23 places across 9 categories — the landmarks on the postcards, the observation decks, the museums, the parks, and the neighborhoods where the city actually lives.
Landmarks
TODO — what landmarks in Prague are actually worth the time.
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.
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.
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.
Museums
TODO — what museums in Prague are actually worth the time.
Mucha Museum
The posters that invented Art Nouveau, made in Paris by a Moravian who considered them commercial work and spent eighteen years on the epic he thought mattered.
National Gallery — Veletržní Palace
Modern and contemporary art in a 1928 functionalist trade-fair building that Le Corbusier came to see and left rattled by.
Museum of Communism
Forty years of a system that shaped everyone here, told through a schoolroom, a shop with nothing in it, an interrogation room and the footage from November 1989.
History
TODO — what history in Prague are actually worth the time.
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.
Vyšehrad
A fortress on a rock above the Vltava, older than the castle in legend and younger in fact, with the national cemetery and almost no tourists.
Strahov Monastery Library
Two baroque library halls of painted ceilings and gilded shelving, and a cabinet of curiosities including two whale penises and a narwhal tusk sold as a unicorn horn.
Parks & Outdoors
TODO — what parks & outdoors in Prague are actually worth the time.
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.
Letná Park
A plateau above the river with the best view of Prague's bridges, a beer garden with 500 seats, and an empty plinth where the largest statue of Stalin ever built used to stand.
Food & Drink
TODO — what food & drink in Prague are actually worth the time.
U Fleků
A brewery and beer hall that has been making one dark lager on the same site since 1499, in eight rooms seating 1,200. Touristy, expensive by Prague standards, and the beer is very good.
Náplavka
A stretch of stone embankment below the road on the Vltava, with a Saturday farmers' market, bars in the old ice vaults, and the best summer evening in the city.
Culture & Music
TODO — what culture & music in Prague are actually worth the time.
The National Theatre
Paid for by public subscription as a statement that Czech was a language worth building a theatre for, burned down weeks after opening, and rebuilt by public subscription again in two years.
The Rudolfinum
A neo-Renaissance concert hall on the river, home of the Czech Philharmonic, where Dvořák conducted the opening concert and where the parliament sat for twenty years.
Shopping
TODO — what shopping in Prague are actually worth the time.
Day Trips
TODO — what day trips in Prague are actually worth the time.
Kutná Hora
A silver-mining town that rivalled Prague in the fourteenth century, with a Gothic cathedral built by miners and a chapel decorated with the bones of forty thousand people.
Český Krumlov
A medieval town inside a hairpin bend of the Vltava, with the second-largest castle in the country and a baroque theatre that still uses its original stage machinery.
Terezín
A Habsburg garrison town the Nazis turned into a ghetto and a transit camp, and then presented to the Red Cross as a model settlement. An hour from Prague and very hard.
Neighbourhoods
TODO — what each part of Prague is like to walk around, and who lives there.
Malá Strana
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.
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.