Explore Czechia

Prague

The Czech capital is one of Europe's most spectacularly preserved medieval cities, where a UNESCO-listed old town, a riverside castle complex, and a bewildering density of Gothic, Baroque, and Art Nouveau architecture pack into a walkable city centre that survived the 20th century almost entirely intact. Charles Bridge, the Astronomical Clock, and the hilltop Hradčany district draw crowds year-round, but the city equally rewards those who venture into Vinohrady, Žižkov, and Letná for its neighbourhood cafés and independent culture.

Český Krumlov

Tucked into a horseshoe bend of the Vltava River in South Bohemia, Český Krumlov looks like a stage set for a fairy tale — a Renaissance castle towering above a perfectly preserved medieval town that earned UNESCO status in 1992. The castle complex, second in size only to Prague Castle, contains one of the last intact Baroque court theatres in the world, complete with original costumes, stage sets, and mechanical flying machinery.

Karlovy Vary

West Bohemia's grandest spa town has been drawing European aristocracy and literary figures to its thermal springs since the 14th century — Goethe, Beethoven, and Karl Marx all took the waters here. Today the colonnades along the Teplá River are lined with delicate spa wafers and the anise-flavoured Becherovka liqueur, while the international film festival each July transforms the opulent Belle Époque hotels into the centrepiece of one of Europe's most elegant outdoor cinemas.

Brno

Moravia's capital is the intellectual and creative counterweight to Prague — a university city of 400,000 with a world-class functionalist heritage anchored by the UNESCO-listed Villa Tugendhat and the dramatic Špilberk Castle, once the Habsburg Empire's most feared prison. Brno's underground catacombs beneath the Capuchin Monastery hold hundreds of mummified monks, while the city's café culture, design scene, and MotoGP circuit attract a young, international crowd who find it less crowded and more affordable than the capital.

Kutná Hora

Once one of medieval Europe's wealthiest cities, Kutná Hora's fortune was built on silver — at its peak in the 14th century, the royal mint here produced a third of all silver currency circulating in Central Europe. The soaring Gothic Cathedral of Saint Barbara, dedicated to the patron saint of miners, and the macabre Sedlec Ossuary — where the bones of up to 70,000 people have been assembled into chandeliers, garlands, and coats of arms — together form a UNESCO site unlike any other on earth.

Plzeň

The birthplace of Pilsner lager in 1842 remains proudly defined by the accidental discovery that changed the world's drinking habits — the Pilsner Urquell Brewery offers underground tours through original oak-barrel cellars where unfiltered beer is still served by candlelight. Plzeň also holds the fourth-largest synagogue in the world, a richly decorated Gothic Cathedral of St. Bartholomew, and a Renaissance square that rewards extended loitering.

Olomouc

Often called Little Prague, Olomouc in central Moravia packs more Baroque fountains into its centre than anywhere else in Central Europe — seven large allegorical fountain groups adorn the historic squares alongside the UNESCO-listed Holy Trinity Column from 1740, one of the finest Baroque sculptures on the continent. The city's university atmosphere, thriving market squares, and underground Roman ruins create a destination that surprises visitors with its depth and feels refreshingly untouristy compared with Bohemian highlights.

Telč

Telč's Renaissance main square is ringed by a continuous row of arcaded townhouses — each with a unique painted facade in pastel yellows, pinks, and ochres — that look unchanged since the 16th century when the local lord Zachariáš of Hradec rebuilt the entire town after a fire in the Italian Renaissance style. The result is so complete and harmonious that UNESCO inscribed it in 1992, and the reflections of the castle and townhouses in the surrounding fish ponds on a still morning create one of the most photographed views in the country.

Mariánské Lázně

The most elegant of Bohemia's spa triangle — alongside Karlovy Vary and Františkovy Lázně — Mariánské Lázně seduced Goethe into his last great infatuation at age 73 and later drew Mark Twain, Edward VII, and Chopin to its neoclassical colonnades and gas-bubbling mineral springs. The central park's Singing Fountain performs a programmed light and music show on the hour, while the delicate cast-iron lacework of the main Colonnade is one of the most refined covered promenades in Central Europe.

Třebíč

A remarkable survival of pre-war Central European Jewish life, Třebíč's Jewish Quarter contains a dense medieval warren of alleyways, two synagogues, and one of the largest and best-preserved Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe — over 11,000 tombstones spanning five centuries. UNESCO inscribed it together with the adjacent Romanesque-Gothic Basilica of St. Procopius in 2003, making Třebíč one of very few sites in the world recognized explicitly for the co-existence of Jewish and Christian heritage.

Kroměříž

The Archiepiscopal Château at Kroměříž and its accompanying Flower Garden and English Park represent one of the finest Baroque palace-and-garden complexes in Central Europe — developed by the powerful Prince-Bishops of Olomouc and inscribed by UNESCO in 1998. The chateau's picture gallery includes a Titian and a Cranach, while the Flower Garden's circular colonnade, modeled on the Vatican's St. Peter's Square colonnade, has been spectacularly restored to its original geometric splendour.

České Budějovice

The capital of South Bohemia is best known internationally as the home of Budvar — the original Budweiser — brewed here since 1895 in a dispute with the American Anheuser-Busch that produced one of the longest trademark battles in legal history. The city's vast central square, one of the largest in Bohemia, is ringed by Baroque and Renaissance arcaded buildings and presided over by the Black Tower, whose panoramic staircase on clear days reaches views stretching towards the Alps.

Litomyšl

This compact east-Bohemian town punches above its weight: it is the birthplace of composer Bedřich Smetana and home to a UNESCO-listed Renaissance arcade castle whose entire facade is covered in 10,000 square metres of sgraffito decoration, making it the finest example of Renaissance painted decoration in Central Europe. The castle courtyard hosts an international opera festival each June that draws audiences from across the continent.

Znojmo

The gateway to South Moravian wine country, Znojmo sits above the Dyje River in a setting dramatic enough for the Přemyslid dynasty to choose it as a second capital in the 12th century — the Rotunda of Our Lady and Saint Catherine contains the oldest surviving Přemyslid dynasty murals, a unique cycle of Romanesque painting from around 1134. The surrounding vineyards produce some of Moravia's most distinctive Rieslings and Welschrieslings, and the wine harvest festival in September fills the medieval streets with torchlit processions.

Mikulov

Mikulov's white Renaissance château crowns a limestone hill above the largest wine-producing district in the Czech Republic, with vineyards stretching to the Austrian border in a landscape that feels closer to the Mediterranean than Central Europe. The town's Jewish cemetery, one of the most important in Moravia, contains over 4,000 tombstones from the 17th to 20th centuries, while the Holy Hill pilgrimage site above town offers sweeping views across the Moravian lowlands towards the distant Carpathian foothills.

Hradec Králové

Hradec Králové's New Town was redesigned in the 1920s by Czech architects Jan Kotěra and Josef Gočár into one of the finest examples of early Czech functionalism — a coherent urban ensemble of Cubist and Art Deco civic buildings, including Kotěra's Museum of East Bohemia, that gave the city the nickname 'the Czech Salon'. The medieval White Tower commanding the old town square and the Bishop's Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, containing the remains of the Hussite military commander Jan Žižka, ground the city in deeper history.

Liberec

Northern Bohemia's largest city sits at the foot of the Jizera Mountains just an hour from Prague, with the Neogothic town hall modeled on Vienna's Rathaus and the Ještěd mountain tower — a television transmitter and hotel that won the Auguste Perret Prize for its spacecraft-like form integrated into the mountain summit — as its two architectural landmarks. As the former capital of the Sudetenland and a major textile-industry centre, Liberec has a complex 20th-century history that its museums engage with frankly.

Pardubice

Famous for two things that seem incompatible — a gruelling steeplechase race held each October since 1874, and a regional specialty of richly spiced Pardubice gingerbread — the city's Renaissance château and the colonnaded main square survived the 20th century remarkably intact. The surrounding parkland along the Elbe River and the city's Art Nouveau architecture give Pardubice a quality of life that makes it consistently among the highest-ranked cities in Czech surveys of livability.

Holašovice

The most remarkable village in South Bohemia, Holašovice is a perfectly preserved example of South Bohemian Baroque folk architecture — farmhouses with ornately decorated gables and arched entrances arranged around a village green that UNESCO inscribed in 1998. The hamlet fell into a near-abandoned state after World War II when its ethnic German population was expelled, but has since been lovingly restored and repopulated, making it one of the most atmospheric and honest village experiences in the country.

Šumperk

The gateway to the Jeseníky Mountains in northern Moravia, Šumperk provides access to the highest range that lies entirely within the Czech Republic — a highland landscape of peat bogs, alpine meadows, and the Praděd peak at 1,491 metres rising above rolling forest that was shaped by centuries of German and Czech settlement. The nearby spa town of Jeseník, associated with the 19th-century water-cure pioneer Vincenz Priessnitz who developed hydrotherapy here, draws visitors seeking a slower pace.

The UNESCO inscription covering Prague's Old Town, New Town, Lesser Town, Josefov, and the Hradčany castle district encompasses one of Europe's most complete medieval and Baroque urban ensembles — a dense layering of Romanesque cellars, Gothic churches, Renaissance palaces, and Baroque facades that survived the 20th century because the city was never systematically rebuilt by any single power. Charles Bridge, Prague Castle, the Old Town Square with its Astronomical Clock, and the Jewish Quarter together form the most visited heritage complex in Central Europe.

The castle and medieval town of Český Krumlov, wrapped in a hairpin loop of the Vltava River, is one of the best-preserved urban ensembles in Central Europe — a labyrinth of steep lanes, turret-studded walls, and painted facades rising above the river gorge largely unchanged since the 16th century. The castle contains one of the last intact Baroque court theatres in the world, with original costumes, stage sets, and mechanical flying machinery that make it a functioning theatre museum of the Habsburg era.

The Renaissance main square of Telč is one of the greatest urban ensembles in Central Europe — a continuous row of arcaded townhouses with brightly painted facades, each unique, rebuilt in Italian Renaissance style after a 16th-century fire at the order of the local lord Zachariáš of Hradec. The ensemble, enclosed by fish ponds that perfectly reflect the castle towers at sunrise, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1992 as an exceptionally complete and harmonious example of Renaissance urban planning.

Designed by Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel and completed in 1727, this extraordinary pilgrimage church blends Baroque architectural language with Gothic structural forms in an original synthesis called Baroque Gothic, created to evoke the medieval traditions associated with Saint John of Nepomuk. The star-shaped plan — five chapels radiating within a star-shaped cloister — was purpose-built to venerate John of Nepomuk, thrown from Prague's Charles Bridge in 1393 and later canonized as the first Baroque saint.

Medieval Kutná Hora was one of Europe's great silver-mining cities, its wealth funding the Cathedral of Saint Barbara — a Gothic masterpiece with soaring flying buttresses and a three-tent roof that took over 500 years to complete. The adjacent Sedlec Ossuary is simultaneously haunting and extraordinary: a 15th-century chapel whose entire interior — ceiling garlands, chandelier, heraldic crests — has been artfully constructed from the bones of between 40,000 and 70,000 people who died in plague epidemics and the Hussite Wars.

The largest park complex in Central Europe, the Lednice-Valtice area in South Moravia was developed over several centuries by the Liechtenstein family into an idealized landscape park dotted with Neo-Gothic and Baroque follies, artificial lakes, and two grand châteaux connected by a 7-kilometre riding avenue. Covering nearly 300 square kilometres, the UNESCO-inscribed landscape includes a Minaret, a fake Roman triumphal arch, a Temple of the Three Graces, and a Reistna hunting lodge — among the most elaborate aristocratic landscape projects in European history.

The Archiepiscopal Château at Kroměříž and its Flower Garden and English Park represent one of the finest and best-preserved examples of Baroque aristocratic residence and landscape design in Central Europe, built by the Prince-Bishops of Olomouc in the 17th and 18th centuries. The château holds a Titian and a Cranach in its picture gallery, while the circular colonnaded Flower Garden — modeled on the Vatican's colonnade — has been fully restored to its original formal geometry.

Holašovice in South Bohemia is an exceptional example of a traditional Central European agricultural village, where farmhouses displaying a distinctive local variant of Baroque folk architecture — white-rendered walls, curved gable scrollwork, arched entrances — are arranged around a triangular village green unchanged since the 18th century. UNESCO inscribed it in 1998 as a rare and near-intact survival of a settlement type once common across Bohemia but almost entirely lost elsewhere.

The Renaissance arcade castle at Litomyšl is the finest example of an Italian-influenced arcade castle in Central Europe, its facades covered in 10,000 square metres of sophisticated sgraffito decoration in warm ochre tones that have survived almost entirely intact since the 16th century. Built on a hillside above the town, the castle is the birthplace of composer Bedřich Smetana and hosts an international opera festival each June in its courtyards.

Built between 1716 and 1754 to give thanks for the end of a plague epidemic, the Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc's Upper Square rises 35 metres to become one of the tallest and most ornate Baroque plague columns in Central Europe — an exceptional achievement for a provincial Moravian city, almost entirely built by local craftsmen without a named architect. The gold-domed chapel at its base, the three tiers of sculptural saints, and the golden Trinity group at the apex together form a pilgrimage monument inscribed by UNESCO in 2000.

Designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and completed in 1930, the Tugendhat Villa in Brno is one of the seminal works of modern architecture — the first private house to receive UNESCO World Heritage status, recognized for its revolutionary application of open-plan living spaces, floor-to-ceiling glass walls that retract into the ground, and the use of industrial materials including chrome-plated steel columns and a translucent onyx dividing wall in a domestic interior. It was in this building in 1993 that the Czech Republic and Slovakia signed their formal separation.

The Jewish Quarter of Třebíč, with its medieval alleyways, two synagogues, and one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in Central Europe containing over 11,000 tombstones, represents a remarkable survival of pre-war Central European Jewish urban life that was spared the destruction visited upon comparable quarters elsewhere. UNESCO inscribed it in 2003 together with the adjacent Romanesque-Gothic Basilica of St. Procopius, making Třebíč one of the very few sites in the world recognized explicitly for the co-existence of Jewish and Christian heritage.

The Kladruby nad Labem stud farm on the Elbe River has been breeding the Kladruber — a Baroque horse of ancient lineage developed specifically for Habsburg court ceremonies — since 1579, making it the oldest continuously functioning stud farm in the world still breeding its founding breed. The surrounding cultural landscape of flood meadows, water channels, allées, and historic stable complexes was inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 as an exceptional example of a traditional equestrian cultural landscape.

The Ore Mountains straddling the Czech-German border were one of Europe's most important mining regions for 800 years, producing silver, tin, cobalt, and later uranium in a landscape of underground shafts, drainage adits, and mining towns whose grid plans and church-dominated skylines were shaped entirely by the logic of extraction. UNESCO inscribed the transboundary region in 2019, recognizing that the technological innovations in mining and water management developed here from the 15th century onwards spread across the world and shaped the global mining industry.

The Czech contribution to this transnational UNESCO inscription covers the three spa towns of western Bohemia — Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně, and Františkovy Lázně — whose thermal colonnades, crescents of cure hotels, and mineral-spring architecture together represent the apex of European spa culture from the 18th to early 20th centuries. Inscribed in 2021 alongside ten other spa towns from Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK, the Czech spa triangle is among the grandest of the group, shaped by the patronage of Habsburg emperors, Russian tsars, and a roll call of European composers and writers.

This vast transnational natural heritage site, shared across 18 European countries, includes primeval beech forest components in the Czech Republic that represent some of the most intact and ecologically significant temperate woodland remaining on the continent — living laboratories for understanding the natural processes of beech forest succession undisturbed by human intervention. The Czech components, inscribed as part of a 2021 extension to a site that originated in 2007, protect irreplaceable biodiversity and stand as benchmarks for ecological restoration across Central Europe.

Inscribed in 2023, Žatec and its surrounding hop-growing landscape in northwest Bohemia represent the world's most celebrated hop-cultivation region — the Saaz hop, grown here since at least the 9th century, is regarded as the finest in the world and underpins the distinctive aroma of Pilsner-style lagers brewed globally. The town of Žatec preserves an extraordinary concentration of oast houses, hop warehouses, and merchant townhouses built on the wealth of the hop trade, forming the most complete hop-industry townscape in existence.