🇨🇿 Europe
Prague, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, with its medieval core, the Charles Bridge and the most famous beer on the continent.
Czechia is one of the countries in Europe that gives you the most per square kilometre. Prague is one of the few large capitals on the continent that came through the twentieth century without being bombed, so its medieval and baroque core is intact rather than rebuilt: you walk on the same stones and under the same façades as five hundred years ago. And two hours in any direction there are towns with castles, nineteenth-century spa resorts and a wine region almost nobody associates with this country.
The other big draw is beer, and not as a cliché: the Czechs drink more beer per head than anyone else in the world by a long way, and pilsner — the most widely drunk style on the planet — was invented here, in Plzeň, in 1842. In practice that means excellent beer for less than the price of a soft drink, in taverns that have been running for centuries. It is a culture of bars, shared tables and long conversations.
For the Latin American traveller, Czechia works very well as a gateway to central Europe: it is noticeably cheaper than Germany or Austria, it connects by train to Vienna, Berlin, Kraków and Budapest in a few hours, and everything is short and manageable. There is one warning worth taking on board from the start: the country does not use the euro but the Czech koruna, and that confusion is what leads a lot of people to change money badly in central Prague.
The local currency is the Czech koruna (CZK). Carry some cash, tell your bank before you travel and check the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for CZK →Prague (PRG) has no airport train: bus 119 drops you at the Nádraží Veleslavín metro station on line A, and from there it is fifteen minutes to the centre. České dráhy trains connect the country, but the private operators RegioJet and Leo Express tend to be cheaper and more comfortable, with on-board service included. Prague–Brno is about two and a half hours, Prague–Vienna about four and Prague–Berlin four and a half along the Elbe valley, one of the finest rail journeys in central Europe. Prague itself is a walking and tram city; line 22 passes most of what you want to see and works as a sightseeing ride in its own right.
May, June and September are the best months: pleasant weather, long days, terraces open and none of the July and August peak, when Prague and Český Krumlov really do fill up and accommodation prices rise. September adds the grape harvest in Moravia, with wine festivals and burčák, that young must you can only get for a few weeks a year and which is not exported.
December is the other high season: the Christmas markets on Old Town Square are among the loveliest in Europe and the city under snow is another thing altogether, though it is genuinely cold — below zero is normal — and it gets dark very early. January, February and March are the cheapest and emptiest months, with the advantage of having the Charles Bridge almost to yourself and the drawback of grey weather. In any season, the difference between visiting central Prague at eight in the morning and at eleven is enormous.
Czech cooking is hearty winter food, built to go with beer. The flagship dish is vepřo-knedlo-zelo: roast pork with knedlíky — slices of boiled dough that stand in for bread and are used to mop up the sauce — and sour cabbage. There is also svíčková, beef loin in a creamy vegetable sauce with cranberries and cream, which tends to be the Czechs' own favourite, and guláš inherited from Hungary, served here with knedlíky. On the street, smažený sýr: breaded fried cheese in a bun, the national late-night food.
Beer is the centre of the table. You order it by the half litre and it comes with a good head of foam, which here is the sign of a well-pulled beer and not a fault. Beyond the big brands there are dozens of small breweries, and in many taverns they will keep replacing your glass automatically until you put the beer mat on top of it, so it is worth knowing that if you want to stop. You toast by saying 'na zdraví' while looking the other person in the eye. And one useful warning: trdelník, that cylinder of sweet dough sold all over central Prague as if it were traditionally Czech, is not; it is a recent invention for tourists.
Czechia is a very safe country, with low crime rates, and you can walk around Prague at night without trouble. The risks are to your pocket, not your person: pickpockets on tram 22, on Old Town Square and on the Charles Bridge when it is packed, and above all currency exchange scams, which are the city's number one complaint. Add taxis that do not turn on the meter and restaurants in the centre with inflated prices or unannounced charges on the bill, which is worth checking before you pay. Emergencies: 112.
The exchange bureau scam deserves its own paragraph because it is systematic: they advertise attractive rates that are in fact selling rates rather than buying rates, or they charge high commissions that appear in the small print. There is a specific legal protection that almost nobody uses: by law you can reverse an exchange transaction within the following three hours, as long as you keep the receipt. The simplest thing is not to change money in the centre and to take korunas straight from a bank ATM, declining the conversion the machine offers you. On the health side there are no particular risks, the tap water is drinkable and the health system is good; travel insurance is compulsory for the Schengen visa, with minimum cover of thirty thousand euros.
Czechia is one of the best value-for-money destinations in Europe, considerably cheaper than Germany or Austria and somewhat above Poland or Hungary. As a rough guide, and noting that there is no official source for these figures, a dorm bed usually runs from twenty to thirty-five euros, a mid-range hotel from seventy to a hundred and twenty, a dish in a local tavern from eight to fifteen euros and a half litre of beer between two and three, less once you leave the centre. The price gap between Prague's historic core and a neighbourhood two tram stops away is enormous.
What saves the most is simple: eat and drink where the Czechs do, a few blocks from the main square rather than inside the tourist perimeter. Midday set-menu lunches cost a fraction of the evening à la carte. Prague's public transport is excellent and cheap, with 24- and 72-hour passes covering metro, tram and bus. And many of the best things — walking the bridge at dawn, the castle grounds, the streets of the old town — cost nothing. The Czech koruna is a closed currency, so it is worth spending it before you leave.
Czechs are more reserved than Latin Americans and fairly direct: they do not make small talk with strangers and first contact can seem dry, but there is no hostility behind it. You greet people when you enter and leave a small shop, you are punctual and you keep your voice down on public transport. In the taverns, though, it all changes: tables are shared with strangers, you ask permission to sit down and that is where the long conversation appears. It is a country with a very particular sense of humour, ironic and absurdist, and you can see it in its literature.
There is one thing worth being clear about, and that is what the country is called. For years Spanish used 'República Checa', and today the official short form is Chequia; in English the short form is Czechia and the long one the Czech Republic. And although until 1993 it was part of Czechoslovakia together with Slovakia, they are two different countries and nobody appreciates having them confused; the same goes for assuming the country was Soviet: it was a satellite of the bloc, with the 1968 invasion and the Prague Spring as wounds that are still present. Communism ended in 1989 with the Velvet Revolution, which was peaceful, and that history is well told in several museums in Prague.
The country we visit today is called Czechia (Česko in Czech) or, by its long official name, the Czech Republic. It is worth clearing that up straight away, because a very widespread confusion persists: Czechoslovakia, the state that joined Czechs and Slovaks, ceased to exist on 1 January 1993, when the so-called 'velvet divorce' peacefully split it into two independent countries. Czechia is the western half of that state, and it is not a homogeneous geographical unit but the sum of three historic lands with centuries of identity of their own: Bohemia (Čechy), the largest, around Prague; Moravia (Morava), to the east, with Brno and Olomouc; and part of old Silesia (Slezsko), in the far north-east, around Opava and Ostrava. The Latin name of Bohemia, Boiohaemum, 'the land of the Boii', comes from the Celtic tribe that lived here in antiquity.
Sitting at the geographical heart of Europe, landlocked and ringed by the mountains of historic Bohemia, this land has been a crossroads between the Germanic and Slavic worlds for a thousand years, and that is why its history is at once brilliant and tragic. The first university in central Europe was founded here, Jan Hus preached here a century before Luther, Charles IV made Prague the capital of the Holy Roman Empire, the Thirty Years' War began here with a window shoved open, the Prague Spring was crushed here under Soviet tanks and here, in 1989, half a million people brought down communism without shedding blood. Travelling through Czechia — from the lanes of Prague's Old Town to the vineyards of Moravia, from the silver mines of Kutná Hora to the spas of Karlovy Vary — means crossing one of the densest and most decisive histories on the continent.
Read the full history of Czechia →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
