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Country guide
Czechia is landlocked and hilly, 78,871 km² bordered by Germany to the west, Poland to the northeast, Slovakia to the southeast and Austria to the south, under a mostly temperate continental climate. Prague is the capital and the largest city, and it is the name most readers arrive with; Brno, Ostrava, Plzeň and Liberec are the other urban centres. The country answers to three names — Czechia, the Czech Republic, and historically Bohemia, the duchy founded in the late 9th century that was recognised as an Imperial Estate of the Holy Roman Empire in 1002 and became a kingdom in 1198.
Every city catalogued in this country so far, ranked by how much there is to see.
Photograph · Deror_avi · CC BY-SA 4.0
Ranked by importance — sitelinks, pageviews and heritage status, not editor preference.
Prague Castle is not a building but a walled quarter on the ridge above the Vltava, and the Prague Castle Administration describes it as the largest coherent castle complex in the world at almost 70,000 square metres, a figure it…
Charles Bridge carries walkers across the Vltava between the Old Town and Malá Strana, and it has done so in the same stone since the beginning of the fifteenth century.
St Vitus Cathedral is the largest and most important church in Prague, and its full dedication is to three saints rather than one: Vitus, Wenceslas and Adalbert.
The Old Town Hall is the seat Prague's Old Town won for itself in 1338, when the estates obtained King John of Bohemia's approval to establish an administration of their own, and Prague City Tourism calls it the oldest institution…
The Astronomical Clock, the orloj, is mounted on the southern side of the Old Town Hall tower on Old Town Square, and it is a working machine rather than an exhibit behind glass.
The Old-New Synagogue stands on Červená street in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, and it is the oldest surviving synagogue in Europe as well as the oldest site in the quarter.
The Church of Our Lady before Týn is the parish church of Prague's Old Town, and the parish that owns it says plainly what it is not: not an ordinary public space, not a market, not a square and not…
The Old Jewish Cemetery lies behind a wall in Josefov, the former Jewish Town of Prague, and is one of the oldest surviving Jewish burial grounds in Europe.
Vyšehrad is a walled hilltop above the right bank of the Vltava, about three kilometres upstream of Charles Bridge, and it is the one major Prague sight that costs nothing to enter.
