🇨🇿 Czechia · Southern and northern Bohemia
České Budějovice is one of those cities many people pass through on the way to Český Krumlov and that nonetheless deserves a stop in its own right. Its great pride is Přemysl Otakar II Square, an almost perfect square 133 metres on each side — one of the largest in central Europe — ringed by arcades, baroque palaces and colourful houses, with the monumental Samson fountain in the middle. Few squares on the continent give this sense of space and harmony.
But if anything put this city on the world map, it is beer. Budweiser Budvar is brewed here, heir to a brewing privilege the city has held since the Middle Ages, and here one of the most famous trademark disputes in history has been fought for more than a century: the fight between the Czech 'Budweiser' and the American 'Budweiser' of Anheuser-Busch, which forces the Czech one to be sold as 'Czechvar' in the United States. Visiting the brewery and understanding this story is one of the city's great draws.
This guide covers České Budějovice with a practical eye: what to see around the square, how to climb the Black Tower, how to organise the visit to the Budvar brewery, which trip to take to the fairy-tale castle of Hluboká, and how to get around and how to arrive from Prague or from Český Krumlov. A quiet, elegant and very Czech city, perfect for an unhurried beer on the largest square in the country.
České Budějovice was founded in 1265 by King Přemysl Otakar II as a royal city, to plant the authority of the crown in a southern Bohemia dominated by the powerful Vítkovci, ancestors of the Rožmberks. Its grid layout around a giant square plaza is a model example of planned medieval town planning. The city prospered on silver from the nearby mines, on salt and on a brewing privilege it has held since the thirteenth century (which is why its beer is 'Budweiser', the beer of Budweis). It stayed Catholic and loyal to the crown during the Hussite wars, withstood sieges, and in 1832 it was the starting point of the first public railway on the European continent, the horse-drawn Budweis–Linz line, built to carry salt. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it lived through the tug-of-war between its Czech and German populations, industrialisation, the Second World War and communism. The full history — with the names, the dates and the beer saga — is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓From the ponds and castles of the Rožmberks in the south — Český Krumlov, České Budějovice, Třeboň — to the textile Sudetenland of Liberec and the sandstone canyons of Bohemian Switzerland in the north: the Bohemia of the great noble houses and of the borderlands.
Read the history of Southern and northern Bohemia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few European cities were born with such a clear political intention written into their own layout. In 1265, King Přemysl Otakar II of Bohemia — one of the most powerful monarchs in the Europe of his day, nicknamed 'the king of iron and gold' — ordered the founding of a royal city at the confluence of the Vltava and the Malše, in the middle of southern Bohemia. He did not do it by chance or out of piety: he did it to plant the authority of the crown in a region that until then was practically in the hands of a single noble family, the Vítkovci, ancestors of the future lords of the Rose, the Rožmberks.
Southern Bohemia was the fief of this powerful line, owner of castles, forests and villages. Otakar II, who wanted a strong, centralised kingdom, needed a base of his own to counterbalance those magnates. So Budějovice — Budweis in German — came into being, a royal city answering directly to the monarch. The man charged with choosing the site and planning it was a knight of the king called Hirzo, and the result was a model of medieval town planning: a regular grid of streets laid out around an enormous square plaza, today's Přemysl Otakar II Square, about 133 metres a side. That monumental square was not an aesthetic whim but the symbol of royal power and the stage for the market that would make the city rich.
An earlier settlement was already mentioned on the site around 1251, but 1265 is the date the city recognises as its birth certificate. Ringed by walls, canals and bastions, České Budějovice soon became a stronghold loyal to the crown in a sea of seigneurial estates.
The new city prospered fast, and it did so on three pillars: silver, salt and beer. Around it, above all in the Rudolfov area, there were silver mines that enriched the burghers of Budějovice through the medieval centuries. The city also became a hub of the salt trade, a highly prized commodity that came from Austria and was distributed across Bohemia: it is no accident that several of its oldest buildings, such as the Gothic granary that today houses the motorcycle museum, served as salt warehouses.
But the privilege that would mark the city's identity for ever was the right to brew beer. Like many royal cities, Budějovice was granted the right to produce and sell beer, a lucrative monopoly. In 1351 it obtained the so-called 'mile right' (mílové právo): within a radius of one Czech mile around the city no outside taverns could exist, and from 1410 nor could competing breweries. Townspeople with the right to brew formed a tradition passed down over centuries.
From that privilege comes the name that would travel the world. In German the city was called Budweis, and the beer brewed there was called 'Budweiser', that is, 'from Budweis', just as 'pilsner' means 'from Plzeň (Pilsen)'. For centuries, 'Budweiser' was simply the brewing demonym of this southern Bohemian city. That word, so tied to the place, would much later become the centre of one of the longest and most famous trademark disputes in commercial history, between the Czech brewery Budějovický Budvar (founded in 1895) and the American Anheuser-Busch.
In the fifteenth century Bohemia became the stage for one of the most important religious upheavals in medieval Europe. The burning at the stake of the reformer Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415 lit the fuse of the Hussite wars: the followers of Hus, the Hussites, rose against the Church of Rome and against the emperor, and their armies — fearsome for their discipline and their war wagons — swept the country destroying monasteries and Catholic towns.
On that divided map, České Budějovice lined up firmly on the Catholic side and with the crown. As a royal city founded precisely to uphold the king's authority, it stayed loyal to the Roman Church and to the emperor Sigismund, and became a Catholic bastion in a southern Bohemia torn by the conflict. Its walls and its loyalty allowed it to resist Hussite pressure while other towns fell or changed sides.
That loyalty was rewarded. The sovereigns repaid the city with privileges and favours that consolidated its wealth and its standing. Through the early modern period, by then under the Habsburgs, České Budějovice remained an important Catholic and commercial centre: in 1785 it became the seat of a bishopric, and its main church, St Nicholas, became a cathedral. The great fires and the baroque rebuilding of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gave it much of the elegant look its historic centre has today, with the Samson fountain (1721-1727) and the blue town hall as its emblems.
In the nineteenth century, České Budějovice starred in an astonishing chapter in the history of European transport. Between 1825 and 1832 the horse-drawn railway linking Budweis (České Budějovice) with Linz, in Austria, was built: it was the first public transport railway on the European continent, ahead of the great steam lines that would come later.
The first stretch, from České Budějovice to Kerschbaum, entered service in 1828, and the complete line was operating on 1 August 1832. There were no steam locomotives: the wagons ran on rails pulled by horses, which were changed at stations along the route of some 120 to 128 kilometres. The main aim was economic and very specific: to move salt efficiently from the Austrian mines into Bohemia, along with other goods and, in summer, a few passengers.
That horse-drawn line was a feat of the engineering of its time and a symbol of the city's drive. Stretches of the route and historic buildings survive today, and a small museum in the city (Muzeum koněspřežky) recalls this continental first. That the first public railway in continental Europe should have started here says a great deal about České Budějovice's role as a crossroads of trade between Bohemia and the German-speaking world.
For centuries České Budějovice was a bilingual city where Czechs and Germans lived side by side — and sometimes in rivalry. The city had two names for the same place: Budweis in German, Budějovice in Czech. In the Middle Ages and the early modern period, much of the urban patriciate and of trade was in the hands of the German-speaking population, while the surrounding countryside was mostly Czech.
With the nineteenth century and the rise of nationalism, that coexistence turned into political tension. The city became a stage of the 'language war' that shook the whole of Bohemia: each community had its associations, its schools, its newspapers and its symbols, and control of the town hall and the institutions was fought over in national terms. The figures tell the story of the shift: in 1880 the population was almost evenly split between Germans and Czechs, but industrialisation and the arrival of workers from the Czech countryside changed the balance, and by 1921 Czechs greatly outnumbered Germans.
That double identity is also at the heart of the famous beer dispute. Because the two languages and the two communities coexisted in the city, there were 'Czech' and 'German' breweries, and the label 'Budweiser' — the German demonym — became attached to both. When the American Anheuser-Busch registered that name in 1878, taking inspiration from the beers of Budweis, it laid the groundwork for a trademark conflict that, more than a century later, still pits the Czech Budvar against the multinational in courts around half the world.
The twentieth century brought České Budějovice the same shocks as the rest of central Europe. After the First World War and the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the city became part of the new Czechoslovakia in 1918. The interwar period consolidated its Czech character and its industrial development, with beer, Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth pencils (a historic city industry) and other manufacturing as the engines of the economy.
The Second World War and the Nazi occupation hit the region hard. In March 1945, in the last months of the conflict, Allied bombing caused destruction and casualties in the city. The end of the war brought liberation, but also the drama of the expulsion of the German population from Czechoslovakia, which ended centuries of bilingual coexistence and closed the old German-speaking Budweis for good.
Under the communist regime installed in 1948, České Budějovice grew as the industrial and administrative centre of southern Bohemia, with new housing estates and factories, while the historic core aged. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the peaceful separation of Czechia and Slovakia in 1993 opened a new stage. Since then the city has restored its beautiful centre, built up its university and its tourism, and once again made the most of its two great treasures: the largest square plaza in the country and a beer that carries its name around the world. Today, with almost 100,000 inhabitants, České Budějovice is the quiet, elegant capital of South Bohemia, the gateway to the castles, ponds and storybook villages of the region.