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.
The palindrome
Charles IV laid the foundation stone at 5.31am on 9 July 1357, and the date was chosen by his astrologers to read as a palindrome: 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1. Whether the emperor genuinely believed it or simply liked the idea is unrecorded, and it is the sort of detail that tells you a good deal about how fourteenth-century Prague thought.
It replaced the Judith Bridge, which a flood destroyed in 1342. Legend has it egg yolks were mixed into the mortar for strength — analysis has found organic material in it, so the story may be partly true, and there is a further story that a village sent hard-boiled eggs by mistake.
It carried all traffic between the two halves of the city for four hundred years, and it was the only bridge in Prague until 1841.
The statues
Thirty of them, in two rows, mostly added between 1683 and 1714 in a deliberate Counter-Reformation gesture — this is a Catholic bridge in a city that had been Hussite and Protestant, and the saints are the argument.
Almost all of what you see are copies. The originals are in the Lapidarium at Výstaviště, which is worth knowing before you photograph one as a 300-year-old carving.
The one to find is St John of Nepomuk, the oldest of the group, at the eighth pier on the right going toward the castle. He was thrown off this bridge in 1393 on the orders of Wenceslas IV, and the bronze relief below his statue has been rubbed to a shine by people touching it for luck. There is a cross set into the parapet marking the spot he went in.
The towers
Both ends are gated by towers and both can be climbed for a fee.
The Old Town Bridge Tower is the better one — Peter Parler’s, and it carries a good deal of iconographic detail. Its west face was damaged in 1648 when the Swedes reached the bridge in the last action of the Thirty Years’ War and got no further.
The Malá Strana towers at the other end are a pair of unequal towers joined by an arch.
When to go
This matters more here than at any other sight in Prague.
Before seven in the morning, the bridge is nearly empty, the light is coming up behind the Old Town, and the mist off the Vltava does most of the work. This is the single best hour in the city.
After eleven at night, it is lit, quiet, and the castle is floodlit above it.
Between ten and eight, it is a dense slow crowd, with stalls, buskers, portrait artists and pickpockets, and crossing takes twenty minutes for a bridge that is 516 metres long.
Practical
Pickpocketing is a genuine issue on the bridge in the crowded hours. Bags in front.
For the view of the bridge rather than from it, go to the Charles Bridge Museum side, the Novotného lávka terrace, or up to Letná — see the park entry.
More Landmarks
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.