Prague

Landmarks

What I would eat first.

Landmarks are fruit. The bigger the sight, the bigger the bonus.

• Staroměstský orloj 1,500 points

  There is a crowd on this square with its collective head tilted back, all facing the same wall, all waiting. They know when. Stand with them and find out, or walk on and hear it happen behind you.

• Karlův most 500 points

  Everybody wants to be on this bridge at the same moment you do. Go at seven in the morning and it is almost empty. Go at noon and you will be eating elbows.

• Prašná brána 500 points

  A dark tower standing on its own in the middle of the street, attached to nothing, leading nowhere. It was a way in once. The wall it belonged to is gone and it stayed behind. Its name is a plain answer to what it once contained, and I am not translating it for you.

• Václavské náměstí 500 points

  Do not trust the word square. This is a boulevard on a hill, shops down both sides, and it takes a while to walk. Start at the bottom and keep going. Something is waiting at the far end and it has been waiting a long time.

• Haštalské náměstí 250 points

  Two minutes from the crowds and the square is empty. A quiet corner with trees, a few parked cars and a church down one side. This is roughly what the rest of it felt like before everybody came.

• Krannerova kašna 250 points

  Everyone walks past this one on the way to the river. It is a tall carved spire covered in small statues, and not a soul stops. Stop. Count them.

• náměstí Jana Palacha 250 points

  A wide open square where the emptiness is the point, bordered on two sides by things that take themselves very seriously. It carries a person's name. That name is the heaviest thing here. Look it up somewhere that is not me.

• Španělská synagoga 250 points

  From the street it gives you almost nothing. The name is a puzzle and the outside will not solve it. Go in. Then come back out and look at the plain wall again.

• Staroměstská mostecká věž 250 points

  You will walk under this one without looking at it, because the bridge is on the other side and the bridge is what you came for. Stop in the archway. Look up at the underside. Then come out and look at what is cut into the face of it.

Eating

Actual food.

Czech cooking was built from what grew here. Potatoes, cabbage and pulses, and then Vienna arrived and left the sweet half behind. Nearly everything comes with a dumpling. There is more than one kind of dumpling, and people will explain all of them to you.

Checked 2 September 2026.

Why here

Somebody stood here and decided.

Look at the bend. The river swings round and leaves a wide low terrace on the right bank, with good soil, enough water, and a ford that sat sheltered between the spur at one end and the rock at the other. Somebody worked out you could get across here. Everything you are about to walk sits on that terrace.

Sources: iprpraha.cz p. 2

Who ruled

Everyone who thought they owned this.

I outlasted all of them. It is the one thing I am good at.

850–1306

The Přemyslids. They put a castle on the far bank in the second half of the ninth century and ran Bohemia from it for four hundred years. The male line ran out in 1306. Dynasties are like lanes. They stop without warning and you are suddenly somewhere else.

Sources: mzv.gov.cz

1310–1437

The house of Luxembourg, and the good century. Charles the Fourth ruled from 1346 to 1378 and spent all of it building. Most of what you came here to look at was his idea. I am not listing it. Walk it.

Sources: mzv.gov.cz, whc.unesco.org

1526–1918

The Habsburgs took the Bohemian throne in 1526 and kept it for very nearly four hundred years. For long stretches the court sat somewhere else entirely, and a city notices that. Prague spent a good part of those centuries being magnificent and being nobody's capital.

Sources: mzv.gov.cz

1918–

On the twenty eighth of October 1918 the Czechs and Slovaks declared a state of their own, and Prague became its capital. It has been a capital ever since, of one country and then of another. I stayed put through all of it.

Sources: mzv.gov.cz

Three facts

Three things I know about this place.

1. The ground you are walking on is not the original ground. Around the middle of the thirteenth century the Old Town was filled in with soil, three to five metres of it, to keep the river out. The Romanesque ground floors went under and stayed under. Plenty of them survive as cellars, one storey below your feet.

   Sources: regiony.rozhlas.cz, praha.aiscr.cz

2. The shape of these lanes was nobody's plan. The Old Town thickened along roads that were already running through it, spreading out around the market, with no layout at all. Somebody only started measuring out plots after 1230. You can still feel where the planning starts.

   Sources: iprpraha.cz p. 1

3. Prague was never comprehensively rebuilt, which is the only reason a medieval street plan is still here to be walked. There is one exception and it is a loud one. From 1893 the old Jewish quarter and the streets around it were cleared: 469 houses came down, and Pařížská was laid dead straight through where the lanes had been. I remember the lanes. A straight street is easier to eat and I miss them anyway.

   Sources: whc.unesco.org, ct24.ceskatelevize.cz

Counted from the streets in the level itself, not from a guidebook.

• 131streets
• 1,896dots
• 29.2km of street
• 38.3km on foot
• 10.9hours at a stroll