Rough Guides - The Rough Guide to Prague

This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a great travel companion when youre on the road.

From the fills you in on history and books and provides a handy Language section.

Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed in the , accessible from the table of contents. Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. Make sure you have the latest software updates, too.

Throughout the guide, weve flagged up our favourite places a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric caf, a special restaurant with the author pick icon . You can select your own favourites and create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible access to everything youll need for your time away.

Above Staromstsk nmst (Old Town Square)

With almost a thousand years of architecture virtually untouched by natural disaster or war, few other cities anywhere in Europe truly compare to Prague. Straddling the slow-moving River Vltava, with a steep wooded hill to one side, the city retains much of its medieval layout and the street facades remain smothered in a rich mantle of Baroque, Rococo and Art Nouveau, most of which successfully escaped the vanities and excesses of twentieth-century development.

For forty years the city lay hidden behind the Iron Curtain, seldom visited by Westerners and preserved in the formaldehyde of Communist inertia. All that changed with the end of totalitarian rule in 1989, and now Prague is one of the most popular city-break destinations in Europe, with a highly developed tourist industry and a list of attractions many other places in Central and Eastern Europe can only envy from afar. Its emergence as one of Europes leading cities has come as a surprise to some but not the Czechs themselves. After all, Prague was at the forefront of the European avant-garde for much of the twentieth century, boasting a Cubist movement second only to the one in Paris and, between the wars, a modernist architectural flowering to rival Germanys Bauhaus.

Today Prague is back at the heart of Europe, where it has always felt it belonged no longer an Eastern Bloc city but a cultured Western-leaning metropolis. It is more than a quarter of a century since the fall of Communism, and an entire generation has grown up feeling very much part of a wider, united continent. The Czech capital has changed in recent years, and mostly for the better boasting more restaurants, new hotels and improved roads but with the Czech koruna riding (too) high and prices rising across the board, it is no longer the budget destination it once was. The new-millennium stag and hen parties may have largely moved on to pastures new to the relief of many but one thing you can be sure of is that the beer is still cheaper, and better, in this beautiful old city than anywhere else in Europe.

clockwise from top left Christmas Market, Old Town Square; Astronomical clock; Steleck Ostrov

With a population of just one and a quarter million, Prague (Praha to the Czechs) is relatively small as capital cities go. It originally developed as four separate self-governing towns and a Jewish ghetto, whose individual identities and medieval street plans have been preserved, to a greater or lesser extent, to this day. Almost everything of any historical interest lies within these compact central districts, the majority of which are easy to explore quickly on foot. Only in the last hundred years has Prague spread beyond its ancient perimeter, and its suburbs now stretch across the hills for miles on every side.

Prague is divided into two unequal halves by the River Vltava. The steeply inclined left bank is dominated by the castle district of Hradany, which contains the citys most obvious sight: Prask hrad or Prague Castle (known simply as the Hrad in Czech), where youll find the cathedral, the old royal palace and gardens, and a host of museums and galleries. Squeezed between the castle hill and the river are the picturesque seventeenth-century palaces and crooked lanes of Mal Strana. This neighbourhood of hidden courtyards and secret walled gardens is home to the Czech parliament and some embassies, and dominated by the green dome and tower of the church of sv Mikul, the citys finest piece of Baroque architecture. At the southern end of Mal Strana, a funicular railway carries you away from the cramped streets to the top of Petn hill, Pragues most central leafy escape, with a wonderful view across the river and historic centre.