Alpine & Central Europe
Czechia
The most beautiful city in central Europe, and a country that drinks more beer per head than any other.
- Capital
- City
- Destination
- Czechia
Bohemia and Moravia were the industrial heart of the Habsburg empire and came through the twentieth century with their architecture largely intact — Prague was not bombed. Outside it, spa towns, sandstone rock cities, Moravian vineyards and a chateau in every second valley go almost unvisited. Beer is a food group here and has been brewed in Plzeň since 1842.
Getting around
Trains and buses are cheap, frequent and comfortable; RegioJet and České dráhy both serve the main routes. Prague's metro and trams are excellent and the night trams run all night.
When to come
Prague is busy from April to October and at Christmas. May and September are the best compromise. Winter is cold, cheap and atmospheric, and the beer halls are the point.
Worth knowing
- Beer is often cheaper than water in a pub and ordering is done by putting a mat on the table.
- The koruna, not the euro; card acceptance is near-universal in cities.
- Prague's centre has aggressive currency-exchange scams — use a bank or an ATM from a real bank.
At the table
- Roast pork, dumplings and cabbage — vepřo knedlo zelo, the national plate
- Svíčková: beef in a cream root-vegetable sauce with cranberry
- Pilsner, drawn slowly with a thick head, at 4°C
Travel regions
2 editorial regions, each opening onto its cities.
Popular destinations
The destinations we have written most about, which is not the same as the ones most people go to — and is the only ranking we can honestly compute.
Prague
Romanesque, gothic, baroque and cubist stacked on top of each other, with a castle above and a bridge in between.
Český Krumlov
A castle town in a tight loop of the Vltava, essentially unchanged since the 18th century.
Brno
Czechia's second city: student, modernist and self-deprecating, with an ossuary of 50,000 under the square.
Mikulov
A chateau town on the Austrian border, surrounded by the country's best vineyards and a limestone ridge.
Český ráj (Turnov)
'Bohemian Paradise': sandstone towers, rock cities and castles on pinnacles, ninety minutes from Prague.
Experiences here
A sample of what is listed across Czechia.
A pub with a tapster, not a menu
The good places pour continuously and mark your tab in pencil; you say when to stop, and the pour type is a real choice.
Vyšehrad and the river bend
The city's first castle, a cemetery of composers, and the whole of Prague from the ramparts without a crowd.
A Moravian cellar at harvest
Burčák — half-fermented, cloudy and briefly available each September — is drunk cold from the barrel and does not travel.
Journeys through Czechia
The Journey Planner holds all 5 of these destinations and the real distances between them. It opens on 7 days, which is the shortest stay this atlas records for each of them added up — change the length, the month, the budget or the pace and build it again.
Fixed points in the year
The record
What we hold about Czechia, where each figure came from, and when it was last checked. The score says what this country is for, not how good it is — it is useful once you are already interested and is not a reason to be.
- Capital
- Prague
- Currency
- CZK — Czech koruna
- Languages
- Czech
- Population
- 10,669,709 (2019) — Natural Earth 1:50m admin 0 countries
- ISO codes
- CZ · CZE
- Time zone
- CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
- Membership
- European Union, Schengen area, European Economic Area
- Typical day
- €45–115 per person ≈ Kč1,120–2,880 indicative
- Best months
- May, June, July, August, September
- Quieter months
- April, October
- Facts checked
- not verified why this matters
Europe Experience Score
How this is calculated — derived from our own tagging, not from measurement. It says what a place is for, not how good it is. The tick on each bar is the median across the whole Atlas, so a bar short of it is a dimension this place is not for.