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.
The town
The Vltava loops back on itself in a tight hairpin and the medieval town sits inside the loop, with the castle on the ridge above. Nothing much was built after 1600 and nothing much was destroyed after that either, which is why it is a UNESCO site and looks the way it does.
It was a Rosenberg family seat, then Eggenberg, then Schwarzenberg. The town was largely German-speaking until 1945, and the expulsion of the German population after the war emptied it — it spent the communist period neglected and semi-derelict, which is the reason it survived unmodernised.
The castle
The second-largest castle complex in the Czech Republic after Prague, on a rock above the river.
The Castle Tower, round and painted in trompe-l’œil, is the landmark and can be climbed for the best view of the loop of the river and the red roofs.
The bear moat has kept live bears since the sixteenth century, when the Rosenbergs claimed kinship with the Roman Orsini family and adopted the bear. There are still bears. Opinions on this vary and the enclosure has been improved considerably.
The Baroque Theatre, built 1680–82, is the reason for the visit if you have any interest in theatre history. It is one of only two eighteenth-century theatres anywhere that retain their original stage machinery, sets, props and costumes — the wooden windlasses, sound machines and sliding flats all still work. Access is by guided tour only, in small numbers, and it sells out.
The Cloak Bridge, a covered multi-storey bridge on tall arches connecting the castle to the theatre and gardens.
The gardens and the revolving open-air auditorium above the town.
The town itself
Small enough to walk in twenty minutes. St Vitus Church, the Egon Schiele Art Centrum — Schiele lived here briefly in 1911 and was thrown out for hiring local teenagers as models — and a museum of marionettes.
Rafting and canoeing on the Vltava through the town is a summer industry, and floating through the middle of a medieval town is a genuinely good way to see it.
The crowds, and the fix
Český Krumlov receives an enormous number of visitors for a town of 13,000, concentrated between about ten and five when the coaches from Prague, Vienna and Salzburg are there.
Stay the night. From five in the afternoon the town is quiet, the light on the river is good, and you have it more or less to yourself. It is the single best piece of advice about this place and the reason a day trip undersells it.
Getting there
Bus is faster and more frequent than the train: from Prague’s Na Knížecí or Florenc, about three hours, with several operators. Book ahead in summer.
Train takes longer and involves a change at České Budějovice.
Day tours run from Prague and are a long day: six hours on a bus for four in the town.
If you are travelling on to Vienna, Salzburg or Munich, Český Krumlov sits neatly on the way and shuttle services connect all of them.
More Day Trips
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.
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.