Prague takes two days. Bohemia takes the rest.
Which castle ticket gets you inside the palaces and which only walks the courtyards. What the Pilsner Urquell trip costs against a Prague microbrewery round. How long Cesky Krumlov really needs. Reviews of every tour you can book in Czechia.
A castle, an hour on the river, a brewery and one day out of the city.
A first trip to Czechia usually comes down to these four. What each one costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The first afternoonCastle Tour with Local Guide and Entry TicketCross the bridge, climb the hill, and have somebody explain why the cathedral took six hundred years. Entry ticket included.
02The cheap hour50-Minute Sightseeing Evening CruiseFifty minutes on the water gives you the castle, the bridge arches and the old mills in the order they were built.
03The beer onePilsner Urquell Experience & Beer TastingInto the Pilsner Urquell cellars for unfiltered lager straight off the oak. The trip everybody else books on their last morning.
04The day outFull-Day Trip to Český KrumlovSouth to the river bend at Cesky Krumlov and back before dinner. The long minibus day that earns its seat.
Brewery cellar, beer bath or a night on the crawl. Pick your evening.
Czechs drink more beer a head than anyone on earth and the bookings follow. Three kinds of beer day, what it costs to join each, and where in the country it happens.
Prague first, then the towns the day trips run to.
A castle city on a bend of the Vltava, a Renaissance town wrapped in its own river loop, a silver-mining cathedral an hour east, Charles IV fortress in the woods, sandstone arches on the Saxon border and a spa town of colonnades. Six starting points, and the best day out in each.
Prague: the castle before lunch, the river after dark.
The whole Prague list →
Cross the bridge early and climb to the cathedral while the courtyards are still empty, then come back down for a cellar and an hour on the water. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the city.
Guided, or just the entry ticket
The plain ticket opens the cathedral, the Old Royal Palace and Golden Lane. A guide is what turns a courtyard walk into a thousand years of Bohemian argument. Both queue at the same gate, so the hour you pick matters more than the ticket.
Fifty minutes on the Vltava
The shortest sightseeing cruises cost less than a museum ticket and cover the stretch of river every photograph of this city is taken from. Evening sailings are the ones people book a second time.
Cellars and microbreweries
Prague brews a great deal more than the two lagers that got exported. A guided round lands you in taprooms behind unmarked doors, with somebody who can tell you what is actually in the glass.
The days out travellers in Czechia book first.
Everything we have written up in Czechia →Demand here is lopsided: a handful of products take a large share of every booking made in the country. These are them, and what each one has that the rest do not.
1
50-Minute Sightseeing Evening Cruise
Board at Pier 4 for a 50-minute evening ride along the Vltava. You’ll pass Rudolfinum, Charles Bridge, Kampa Island, Prague Castle, Petřín Tower, and Štvanice Island. Choose the open deck for photos or the warm indoor cabin, then follow the commentary in Czech, English, or German, with printed guides and an app in other languages.
From · $21
Read our review →
2
Medieval Dinner with Unlimited Drinks
from $75
3
Skip-the-line Castle Ticket and Optional AudioGuide
from $35
4
Castle Tour with Local Guide and Entry Ticket
from $61
5
Prague Castle 2.5-Hour Tour Including Admission Ticket
from $57
6
Oldtown, Medieval Underground & Dungeon History Tour
from $30
7
Vltava River Night Cruise with Buffet
from $81
8
Panoramic Vltava River Cruise
from $16
Bohemia kept far more castles than it has any use for.
Prague Castle is the largest complex of its kind anywhere, and it is only the beginning. Karlstejn was built to hold the imperial crown jewels, Cesky Krumlov has a painted tower over the water, and most of the rest are an hour from the city by minibus.
Prague reads better from the river than from the bridge.
The Vltava runs straight under the castle hill, so an hour on a boat hands you the whole skyline in the order it was built: the mill wheels, the bridge arches from below, the terraces on the far bank. Sailings leave the quays either side of Charles Bridge all day, and the dinner boats turn the same loop after dark.
Almost everything good in Bohemia sits inside a two-hour drive.
The minibuses leave Prague between seven and nine and have you back for dinner. Cesky Krumlov and Kutna Hora are the two most people pick. The sandstone country on the Saxon border is the one they wish they had booked instead.
All the trips that leave Prague →
What a day out here costs, cheapest rung first.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. Prague is one of the cheapest capitals in Europe to book things in, and the bottom rung of this ladder is where that shows.
Tower tickets, old-town walks, brewery tastings and the short river cruises.
The full-day standards: Cesky Krumlov, Kutna Hora, Karlstejn and the guided castle rounds.
Private guides, the sandstone-country hikes and the once-a-trip splurges that earn it.
Three things that only happen in Czechia.
Old towns and cathedrals turn up all over central Europe. A bath full of warm beer, a theatre that works only in the dark, and a chapel decorated in human bone do not.
The Beer Spa
You sit in a wooden tub of warm water, hops and brewing yeast, with an unlimited tap of lager at your elbow. The Czechs did not invent the bath. They worked out that what is left over from brewing is good for your skin, and that an hour is about as long as anyone can stay in one.
- 1Bernard Beer Spa with Beer and Massage Option★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 4,164 reviews
- 2Beer and Wine Spa Bath with Salt Cave Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 270 reviews
- 3Beer Spa Experience with Unlimited Beer and Sauna★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 190 reviews
Black Light Theatre
A stage painted black, performers dressed in black, and objects lit by ultraviolet so they seem to move on their own. The technique arrived here in the late fifties and never left. Several small theatres near Wenceslas Square run nothing else, and the shows carry no dialogue at all.
- 1WOW Show Black Light Theater★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 3,990 reviews
- 21.5-Hour Black Light Theater Srnec Performance★★★★★★★★★★ 4.0 · 1,589 reviews
- 3Prague Black Light Mini Golf and Games with free Drinks★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 116 reviews
The Sedlec Ossuary
A chapel under a church in Kutna Hora, decorated entirely in human bone: a chandelier that uses every bone in the body, a coat of arms, four pyramids in the corners. A half-blind monk began stacking in the fifteenth century, after plague and war filled the graveyard past what the ground could take.
- 1Kutna Hora UNESCO Site Tour with Bone Chapel★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 1,917 reviews
- 2Kutná Hora, St.Barbara’s Church, Sedlec Ossuary★★★★★★★★★★ 4.3 · 673 reviews
- 3Day Trip to Kutná Hora by train from Prague★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 587 reviews
Four Czech bookings that will not wait.
Most of this country can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on capped guided slots, a short season and a fixed performance clock, and none of them take any interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Klementinum Library & Astronomical Tower Guided TourThe baroque library hall is open on guided tours only, running to a set clock with a cap on each group. Arrive without a time and you wait for the next one.
- 02Bernard Beer Spa with Beer and Massage OptionA beer spa has a handful of tubs and every session runs a full hour. Evenings and weekends go first.
- 03VIP Best Reviews: Bohemian & Saxon Switzerland from PragueThe gorge boats on the Kamenice run in the warm months only, and the small-group trips take one minibus a day.
- 04Entry Ticket Classical Concert at the Mirror ChapelChapel and church concerts keep a fixed programme, usually one performance a night in a room that seats a couple of hundred.
From November it is dark by four, and every good answer is indoors.
Czech winters are cold, grey and short on daylight, which is exactly why so much of this country happens under a roof. Cellars and beer halls, a chapel concert, the medieval passages under the Old Town, and a theatre that needs the dark to work at all.
By place
By the kind of Czech afternoon you want
Prague, a fortress, the silver town and the sandstone: the week most people end up doing.
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