Prague

Most people do Prague in a straight line: Old Town Square, the crowd that gathers under the astronomical clock on the hour, over Charles Bridge, up the hill to the Castle, back down for dinner. It is a genuinely good line. It is also about a kilometre and a half of a city of 1.3 million, priced for visitors who will only be there once.

What follows is Prague arranged the other way round — an early start that gets ahead of the tour groups, an afternoon that goes either underground or into water, beer at three, because that is when the good pub opens, and a night in a district most itineraries never reach.

Start at nine, indoors, and climb something

The Klementinum is a former Jesuit college a minute from the bridge, and its 50-minute tour covers three things you can't see elsewhere. The Baroque library hall — 27,000 volumes under ceiling frescoes about learning — is viewed from the doorway; nobody is allowed in, which is worth knowing before you pay. What you do walk into is the Meridian Hall, where a slit in the wall throws a line of sunlight across a string laid on the floor, and the instant the two meet is solar noon. From 1842 until 1928 an astronomer stood on the tower gallery above and waved a flag the moment it happened, so the city below could set its clocks. Then you climb the 68-metre Astronomical Tower: 172 steps, spiral, no lift, past a weather station that has recorded Prague's temperature every day since 1 January 1775.

Tickets are 380 CZK, or 300 if you're 16 to 26, and the first two tours are half price — 9:00 in English, 9:30 in Czech. Take the nine o'clock and you're back out before Charles Bridge fills.

Where the real bridge statues went

Thirty statues stand on Charles Bridge and nearly all of them are copies. From 1965 the originals were moved indoors out of the weather, and six of the Baroque ones ended up under the fortress at Vyšehrad, in a vaulted hall called Gorlice. You get to it along 300 metres of casemate tunnel dug into the ramparts; the tour runs 45 to 60 minutes in Czech and English and costs 330 CZK at the door, 295 booked online. Everything above ground is free, including the cemetery where Dvořák and Mucha are buried, and the walk along the ramparts has the river underneath it and no tour groups on it.

The other underground option is stranger. The old wastewater treatment plant in Bubeneč was built between 1900 and 1906 and is the oldest surviving plant of its kind in Europe. Tours run at weekends only — 10:00, 11:30, 13:30 and 15:00, 280 CZK — through the sedimentation tunnels and into a two-storey engine room where the steam engines installed in 1904 still turn. Commentary is in Czech unless you book an English tour ahead for a group of six or more.

Saturday belongs to the river

Náplavka is the lower embankment on the right bank of the Vltava, below Rašínovo nábřeží. Every Saturday from 8am to 2pm it holds the farmers' market Prague actually shops at, and most of what you buy there gets eaten standing up. Set into the wall behind the stalls are the kobky: twenty vaults that once stored goods hauled off the river and now hold cafés, bars and studios. Six were fitted with five-metre glass discs that pivot open on a diagonal, designed by the architect Petr Janda, and the tenants moved in from September 2019. On a warm day the whole strip works as one long, cheap outdoor sitting room.

Swimming, properly

Podolí is a swimming stadium finished in 1965 to a design by Richard Podzemný, and the roof over the indoor pool is a concrete wave that doubles as a grandstand for 5,000. Outside there's a heated 33-metre pool open year-round and a 50-metre one that runs from 1 May to 15 September. The complex opens at 6am and shuts at 9:45pm, so you can swim before anything else in the city is awake. A full day costs 350 CZK, an ISIC student ticket 230, and if you arrive after 3pm it drops to 180.

Don't substitute the lake at Divoká Šárka: its paid swimming area closed in 2022, and in late July 2026 the city's hygiene service banned swimming in the Džbán reservoir over blue-green algae.

Three in the afternoon

U Zlatého tygra on Husova opens at 15:00 and is full by about quarter past. It pours one beer, Pilsner Urquell, in one size, at communal tables. Bohumil Hrabal drank here for decades; on 11 January 1994 Václav Havel walked Bill Clinton in to sit down with him, and the three of them went on to the Reduta jazz club afterwards, where Havel handed Clinton a saxophone. Get there before three or don't bother.

Later, go up to Letná. The beer garden at Letenské sady 341 has 1,400 seats on a terrace directly above the river, Pilsner from fourteen tanks, and a view straight down the Vltava at the bridges. It's seasonal — spring into autumn — and cards are fine. Twenty metres away stands a giant metronome, ticking since 1991 on the plinth where a 15.5-metre granite Stalin loomed over the city from May 1955 until 800 kilos of explosives took him down in the autumn of 1962. The bar that used to run inside that plinth shut for good in July 2025 — the concrete is no longer safe — so the beer garden is the plan, not a fallback.

Late, and out of the centre

Cross Club in Holešovice is assembled almost entirely from scrap: cogs, pipes, ducting and salvaged machinery, much of it moving and lit, inside and all over the front of the building. The café and kitchen open at 2pm, the main stage at 8pm and runs to 5am — 7am on Fridays and Saturdays — and most weeknights there's no cover charge.

Kasárna Karlín, a former army barracks, screens films outdoors in its courtyard on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays until 23 September. It's open daily 11:30 to 23:00 unless it rains, and only the courtyard: the indoor halls are still closed.

One thing that costs nothing

The Museum of Prague at Florenc reopened on 6 December 2025 after five years and nearly 300 million CZK of work, and entry is free through to the end of 2026. Go for Langweil's model: a 1:480 paper-and-card city of more than two thousand buildings, made by hand between 1826 and 1837 by a man who worked at the Klementinum library, now laid out across twelve cases. Most of the Jewish Town he modelled was demolished within sixty years, which makes his cardboard the only place several of those streets still stand.