🇨🇿 Czechia · Prague and central Bohemia
Few European capitals keep a historic core as intact and as beautiful as Prague. The 'city of a hundred spires' spreads along both banks of the Vltava, crowned by the silhouette of its enormous castle and crossed by the Charles Bridge, the fourteenth-century stone bridge studded with baroque statues that has become its most recognisable image. Walking its cobbled streets is like stepping into a storybook: Gothic, Renaissance, baroque and art nouveau all live side by side here, with no war having erased any of them.
But Prague is not just an open-air museum. It is the city of Kafka and of the Velvet Revolution, of the oldest and best-loved beer in Europe, of literary cafés and puppet theatres, of classical concerts in centuries-old churches. It is the Astronomical Clock that has told the time since 1410, the Jewish quarter with its cemetery and synagogues, the little streets of Malá Strana at the foot of the castle and the golden sunset over the rooftops seen from Petřín hill. A city that mixes the solemnity of history with a very lively bohemian side.
This guide covers the essentials of Prague with a practical, warm eye: how to organise the castle visit, when to cross the Charles Bridge to dodge the crowds, what to see in the Old Town and the Jewish quarter, how to get around by metro and tram, where to drink the best Czech beer and which day trips to take from here. Prague is compact, walkable and safe, and with a little planning it delivers some of the most memorable days of any trip through central Europe.
Prague grew up around a crossing of trade routes on the Vltava and around a castle founded in about the ninth century by the Přemyslid dynasty, the first dukes of Bohemia. Legend says it was Princess Libuše who prophesied the city's greatness. Through the Middle Ages, Prague grew as the capital of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and lived its first golden age in the fourteenth century under the emperor Charles IV, who made it the capital of the Holy Roman Empire: he founded the first university in central Europe (1348) and ordered the building of the Charles Bridge, St Vitus Cathedral and the New Town, giving Prague the monumental scale that still astonishes today. In the fifteenth century the Hussite wars — set off by the burning of the reformer Jan Hus in 1415 — branded Czech religious history. Later, under the Habsburgs, the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 lit the Thirty Years' War. During Austrian rule the city filled with baroque palaces and churches. In 1918, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Prague became the capital of the new Czechoslovakia. It lived through the Nazi occupation, the communist regime, the Prague Spring of 1968 and, finally, the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989, which brought democracy back. In 1993, with the amicable separation of Czechia and Slovakia, it remained the capital of today's Czech Republic. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The political and spiritual heart of Czechia: the imperial Prague of Charles IV, the city of Jan Hus and of the defenestrations, Kafka's old Jewish ghetto, the stage of 1968 and of the Velvet Revolution, and the medieval silver of Kutná Hora.
Read the history of Prague and central Bohemia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Prague begins, like that of so many great cities, on the blurred line between myth and archaeology. The founding legend, written down by the chronicler Cosmas of Prague in the twelfth century, tells that Princess Libuše, daughter of the legendary leader Krok and gifted with prophecy, ruled the Czechs from the rock of Vyšehrad above the Vltava river. One day, in a trance, Libuše pointed to a hill on the other side of the river and announced: 'I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars.' She ordered her envoys to go into the forest and build a castle where they found a man carving the threshold ('práh' in Czech) of his house: hence, according to the myth, the name Praha.
Under pressure to take a husband, Libuše chose Přemysl, a ploughman, founding the Přemyslid dynasty that would rule Bohemia for centuries. Beyond the legend, archaeology confirms that the hills on both sides of the Vltava were inhabited from prehistoric times, and that the two key strongholds — Prague Castle (Pražský hrad), founded around the year 880 by Prince Bořivoj I, and Vyšehrad, somewhat later — became the poles around which the city grew.
The decisive Christian figure of those early times is St Wenceslas (Václav), duke of Bohemia in the tenth century, murdered by his brother Boleslav around the year 935 and made patron saint of the Czech people soon afterwards. His cult and the rotunda that held his remains at the Castle gave Prague a spiritual weight that would stay with the city throughout the Middle Ages.
The most glorious moment in Prague's history came in the fourteenth century with Charles IV of Luxembourg (Karel IV), king of Bohemia from 1346 and Holy Roman Emperor from 1355. Raised partly at the French court and deeply attached to his native land, Charles made Prague the imperial capital and the political, intellectual and artistic centre of central Europe, turning it into one of the largest and most splendid cities on the continent.
The works of his reign still define the city's skyline. In 1348 he founded Charles University, the first university in central Europe. That same year he ordered the building of the New Town (Nové Město), an ambitious planned extension laid out around large squares such as today's Wenceslas Square. He commissioned the start of the Gothic cathedral of St Vitus at the Castle, and had the stone bridge that now bears his name built, the Charles Bridge (Karlův most), begun in 1357 to replace an earlier one destroyed by a flood. Outside the city he had Karlštejn castle built to guard the imperial crown jewels.
Under Charles IV, Prague was also raised to an archbishopric (1344), which made it ecclesiastically independent and reinforced its prestige. That century left the city an extraordinary Gothic heritage and the memory of an age when, in the words of Czech tradition, Prague was truly the heart of Europe.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, Prague was the stage for one of the most influential religious movements in pre-modern Europe. The theologian and preacher Jan Hus, rector of Charles University and preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel, denounced the corruption of the clergy and defended communion in both kinds (bread and wine) for all the faithful, anticipating Luther's Protestant Reformation by a century. Summoned to the Council of Constance with a safe conduct, he was declared a heretic and burned at the stake in 1415, which caused enormous outrage in Bohemia.
The conflict broke out in 1419 with the First Defenestration of Prague: a Hussite crowd burst into the New Town hall and threw several councillors out of the window. So began the Hussite wars (1419-1434), in which the followers of Hus — led militarily by the brilliant one-eyed strategist Jan Žižka — resisted one crusade after another sent against them. For decades Bohemia became a territory largely outside obedience to Rome.
The wars left a deep mark on Czech identity: Jan Hus became a national hero and a symbol of freedom of conscience (his great monument presides over the Old Town Square today), and the Hussite movement is considered a forerunner of the European Reformation. The final compromise, the Compacts of Basel, partly recognised the Hussite demands, but religious tensions would shape Czech history for the following two centuries.
From 1526 the crown of Bohemia passed into the hands of the Catholic Habsburg dynasty, which would rule the country for almost four centuries. One brilliant interlude was the reign of the emperor Rudolf II, who at the end of the sixteenth century moved his court to Prague (1583) and turned the Castle into a centre of art, alchemy and science, drawing astronomers such as Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Mannerist painters and all kinds of scholars and eccentrics. It was a second cultural golden age for the city.
But tensions between the Protestant majority of the Czech nobility and the Catholic crown eventually exploded. On 23 May 1618, in what is known as the Second (or Third) Defenestration of Prague, Protestant nobles threw two imperial governors and a secretary out of a Castle window. The episode set off a rebellion and, with it, the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), one of the most devastating conflicts in European history.
Bohemia's fate was sealed at the battle of White Mountain (Bílá hora), at the gates of Prague, on 8 November 1620: the defeat of the Protestant nobles was total. The following year, 27 leaders of the revolt were executed on the Old Town Square, an event recalled by the crosses set into the pavement. Forced recatholicisation followed, along with the exile of much of the Protestant elite and the loss of Czech autonomy. On the other side of the coin, baroque Prague of churches, palaces and statues — including many on the Charles Bridge — was largely born of this period of Catholic Habsburg rule.
During the nineteenth century, under the rule of the Austrian and then Austro-Hungarian empire, Prague lived through a powerful Czech national revival (národní obrození). Intellectuals, linguists and historians such as Josef Jungmann and František Palacký rescued and modernised the Czech language, wrote the national history and fed a sense of identity against the dominant German culture. That impulse took shape in emblematic buildings such as the National Theatre, funded by public subscription and opened in 1881 (and rebuilt after a fire in 1883), and the National Museum that crowns Wenceslas Square.
Industrialisation transformed the city, which grew, modernised and absorbed neighbourhoods and suburbs. At the beginning of the twentieth century Prague was a cosmopolitan place where Czechs, Germans and a significant Jewish community lived side by side — a community whose quarter (Josefov) and whose legacy, with figures such as Franz Kafka, the city still remembers. The movement for Czech autonomy kept growing within the empire.
The First World War brought matters to a head. With the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the independence of Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in Prague on 28 October 1918, a new state joining Czechs and Slovaks. Its first president was the philosopher and statesman Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and Prague became its capital. The young democratic republic, one of the few that survived in interwar central Europe, enjoyed a period of prosperity and cultural vitality cut short by the Nazi threat of the late 1930s.
The twentieth century brought Prague its darkest chapters. After the Munich Agreement of 1938, which handed the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, Hitler's troops occupied the rest of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, setting up the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The occupation was brutal: Prague's Jewish community was all but exterminated in the Holocaust — many passed through the Terezín ghetto-camp — and the repression grew harsher after the 1942 assassination attempt on the Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. Prague was one of the last major European cities to be liberated, during the uprising of May 1945.
The post-war years did not bring freedom. In February 1948 the Communist Party seized power in a coup, and Czechoslovakia was absorbed into the Soviet bloc. Decades of authoritarian rule, political trials and a planned economy followed. The most famous attempt at reform came in 1968: the Prague Spring, led by Alexander Dubček, which promised 'socialism with a human face' and greater freedoms. The answer was the invasion by Warsaw Pact tanks in August of that year, which crushed the reforms and gave way to the harsh 'normalisation'.
The communist regime finally collapsed in November 1989 with the Velvet Revolution (sametová revoluce), a peaceful transition driven by mass demonstrations on Wenceslas Square and led by the playwright and dissident Václav Havel, who became president. In 1993 the peaceful separation of Czechoslovakia (the 'velvet divorce') gave birth to the Czech Republic, with Prague as its capital. In 1992 the historic centre of Prague was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.