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.
The view
The plateau’s southern edge looks straight down the Vltava at the sequence of bridges — Čechův, Štefánikův, Mánesův, Charles — with the Old Town on one bank and the castle rising on the other. It is the view that photographers use for the classic shot of Prague’s bridges in morning mist.
It is free, it is a ten-minute climb from the river, and it is the best thing to do in Prague at seven in the morning after Charles Bridge.
The metronome, and what was there before
On the terrace above Čechův Bridge stands a 23-metre metronome, installed in 1991 and working intermittently since.
It occupies the plinth of the Stalin Monument — the largest statue of Stalin ever built, 15.5 metres of him leading a queue of Czech and Soviet figures, which Praguers nicknamed the meat queue. It took five and a half years to build and was unveiled in 1955, two years after Stalin’s death and a year before Khrushchev’s denunciation of him.
It stood for seven years and was blown up with 800 kilograms of explosive in 1962. The sculptor had killed himself weeks before the unveiling.
The plinth and the vast underground chambers beneath it remain. The terrace is now a skateboarding spot and one of the city’s best places to drink a beer at sunset.
November 1989
Letná is where the Velvet Revolution ended. On 25 and 26 November 1989, around 750,000 people assembled on the plain here — the largest gathering in Czechoslovak history — and Alexander Dubček, who had not been seen in public since 1968, appeared alongside Václav Havel.
The general strike two days later ended the government’s position. The whole thing, from the beating of students on Národní on 17 November to the resignation of the Politburo, took eleven days.
The beer gardens
Letenský zámeček — the château beer garden, seated, with food and a restaurant.
The eastern beer garden above the metronome, which is the famous one: several hundred seats under the trees, self-service, a plastic cup, and the whole city in front of you. It runs from spring to autumn and it is where a large part of Prague spends a warm evening.
Neither is a tourist operation and both are cheap by Prague standards.
The rest of the park
Broad wooded avenues, a working carousel from 1892 — one of the oldest in Europe — the Hanavský Pavilion, a cast-iron neo-baroque folly from the 1891 exhibition, now a restaurant with a terrace, and the Sparta Prague stadium at the western end.
Practical
Free and always open, and safe at night in the used parts, though it is a large dark park after midnight.
Combine with the Veletržní Palace and Holešovice, both ten minutes away, for a half-day that almost no visitor does.
