Czech Republic

The Czech Republic sits landlocked in the centre of Europe, bordered by Germany, Austria, Poland, and Slovakia, with the historical regions of Bohemia in the west and Moravia in the east. Prague, its capital on the Vltava River, holds one of the largest intact historic city centres on the continent. Beyond it lie the spa towns of West Bohemia, the sandstone country of Bohemian Switzerland on the German border, and the old silver town of Kutná Hora an hour to the east.

Prague

Prague is where my Czech story starts. I studied there for a semester, met Daria in the city, and years later we married in its Old Town. Every return trip hands me a new composition, or an old view looking different in new light, which is why the capital fills more of my archive than any other Czech destination.

The city was the seat of Bohemian kings and the residence of Holy Roman Emperors, and it came through the Second World War almost untouched. The result is architecture from every epoch standing shoulder to shoulder, Gothic to Baroque to Art Nouveau. My single favourite view is the one above: the castle and Charles Bridge from across the Vltava, where a quiet zone in the otherwise rough water doubles every light. Daria keeps telling me to find something new, and I keep re-shooting it anyway; the evening I took this frame, I reached the spot by tram with minutes to spare before rain clouds ended the dusk. I cover the city in depth in my full Prague travel guide; what follows here are the places I keep going back to.

Prague Castle and St Vitus Cathedral

Prague Castle was founded in the 9th century and is often cited as the largest ancient castle complex in the world. My connection to it runs through my father: he photographed the view from the castle gate down over the city decades before I stood in the same spot before dawn to take my own version of his composition.

Inside the complex rises St Vitus Cathedral, the largest church in the Czech Republic and a building so tall that photographing the whole cathedral from the courtyard took me years of returning with better skills and equipment. The first church on the site went up in 930. One account holds that Duke Václav chose Saint Vitus as patron because the name in Czech, Svatý Vít, sounded almost identical to Svantevit, a pagan deity his people already worshipped. The castle was also the subject of my first night photo taken on a tripod, shot the first weekend after I bought it.

Charles Bridge

Construction of Charles Bridge began in 1357 under Charles IV, and it carried the only permanent crossing of the Vltava in Prague for centuries: 516 metres of stone connecting the Old Town with Malá Strana. I cross it on every visit, ideally at dawn, when the bridge stands empty under its lamps and the 30 Baroque statues seem to guard the crossing alone. On one Sunday morning, a statue caught the first sunlight in complete silence, the castle waking up behind it. The most famous of the thirty is St John of Nepomuk, thrown from this bridge in the 14th century; touching the plaque at its base is said to guarantee your return to Prague.

The bridge rewards work from every angle. From the Old Town bank, its arches lead the eye across the river to Malá Strana and the castle above. At night I photograph the Old Town Bridge Tower from a riverbank spot most photographers skip once the blue hour ends. And the tower itself is open to visitors: when the bridge below was too crowded to work, I climbed it and found an open window framing the castle at sunset, a composition I could not have planned.

Old Town Square

The Old Town Square is usually a wall of tourists waiting for the Astronomical Clock, a mechanism installed in 1410 and usually cited as the oldest astronomical clock still operating. Set the alarm early enough and the square shows a different face: I photographed the Old Town Hall at 4:24 in the morning with a 10mm lens and nobody in the frame. That photo carries extra weight for me, because one year after I took it, Daria and I walked through those very doors for our wedding.

The tower of that same building is the best viewpoint on the square. From the top, the Church of Our Lady before Týn shines in the night, the Gothic basilica whose construction ran from the 14th century to the start of the 16th. The gallery is windy and too narrow for a tripod, so I mounted my camera on the railing with a Gorillapod. From the same tower at dusk I traced the rooftops of the Royal Way to a crescent moon over Prague Castle, the coronation route Bohemian kings walked from the Old Town to St Vitus Cathedral. The entire Old Town has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1992.

Malá Strana

Cross the bridge and you enter Malá Strana, the “Little Side of the River.” It was founded as an independent town in 1257 by King Přemysl Ottokar II, and only in 1784 was it formally incorporated into Prague. After the Hussite Wars and repeated fires it was a poor quarter; the arrival of the royal court around the castle later drew aristocrats and artists, and their palaces still line its streets, many of them now embassies.

It was Daria who stopped me in one of its lanes on our way to a castle shoot. The morning light was on the sgraffito ornament of an arch spanning a cobbled alley, a mint-green vintage Beetle parked at the far end of the street. Sometimes one small ornament carries the whole frame.

Vinohrady and Letná Park

The districts beyond the postcard centre earn their own evenings. We lived near Jiřího z Poděbrad Square in Vinohrady, a district whose name means “vineyards,” before and after our wedding, and two days after the ceremony I photographed the Church of the Most Sacred Heart of Our Lord under a night sky, Jože Plečnik’s 1932 landmark, with the Žižkov Television Tower lit in the Czech tricolour behind it.

On the other side of the river, Letná Park rises above the Vltava where the enormous Stalin Monument once stood; a giant metronome replaced it. From its stairs we watched a sunset I had never seen in Prague before or since, the whole row of Vltava bridges turning pink under the clouds. The golden city, that evening, was not golden at all.

Bohemian Switzerland National Park

Near the village of Hřensko on the German border, the Pravčická Gate is the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, spanning 26.5 metres at its base and standing 16 metres high. Climbing on it has been forbidden since 1982 to protect the eroding sandstone, which is why the scene in The Chronicles of Narnia where the children run across it was finished in the studio. Daria and I hiked here in early autumn, when the first trees were turning and the arch stood over a valley of colour, the Elbe Sandstone Mountains rolling away behind it.

Beside the arch, the Clary-Aldringen princes built the Falcon’s Nest, a hunting-lodge hotel with a restaurant that still operates. From the rock overhang above the terrace, the lodge and the autumn cliffs fill one frame; sitting there with a Czech beer and that view is its own reward. The same sandstone country continues across the border as Saxon Switzerland, an easy pairing with a photography trip to Dresden.

Kutná Hora

Silver was discovered near Kutná Hora in the 13th century, and for the next three hundred years the town competed with Prague itself in economic and political weight. The main seam was flooded in the 16th century and the mines were finally abandoned in the 18th, but the skyline still carries the former glory: from across the vineyard terraces, the tented spires of St Barbara’s Church stand beside the former Jesuit College, the church a Gothic showpiece funded entirely by mining money.

The town’s other landmark is the Sedlec Ossuary, a chapel decorated with the skeletons of more than 40,000 people. I visited it over a decade ago and the memory of that room still gives me goosebumps. Kutná Hora sits about an hour east of Prague and has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1995.

Karlovy Vary

Karlovy Vary is the largest of the Czech spa towns, historically famous for 13 hot springs and some 300 smaller ones; you pass them at almost every step through the centre. The healing effect of the water here has been known since long before the town had its name.

The weather on our visit was hazy and far from ideal for photography, so I leaned into it: in post-processing I pulled out the colours that give the view along the Teplá river to the Mill Colonnade a deliberately retro cast, the spa houses stacked up the wooded hillside behind it. Together with Mariánské Lázně and Františkovy Lázně, the town forms the golden trinity of West Bohemian spas.

Mariánské Lázně

Mariánské Lázně, Marienbad in German, gathered an improbable guest list in its heyday: Goethe, Chopin, Wagner, Edison, King Edward VII, Tsar Nicholas II. Its icon is the Maxim Gorky Colonnade, a neo-Baroque cast-iron structure built in 1888 and 1889. I went in planning to photograph symmetrical columns, and the low sun delivered: the golden interior of the colonnade stood empty, the ironwork throwing long shadows down the promenade.

Then I looked up, and spent almost thirty minutes on the frescos painted across the colonnade ceiling, circular panels of figures and floating spheres that read as a metaphor of the human desire to fly. Always look up in a building like no other.

The Springs of Mariánské Lázně

The springs are the reason the town exists, and each carries its own reputation. Rudolfův Pramen, Rudolph’s Spring, pours water high in calcium under a white classical colonnade. The Ambrose Spring carries a better legend: drink from it, and you will find your other half within the year. In the same month Daria and I met, she had been drinking its water.

The colonnade changes character after dark. At blue hour, the lit facade takes on the frailty of an old music box against the ink-coloured sky, and on summer evenings the Singing Fountain beside it runs its choreographed displays.

Františkovy Lázně, the third and smallest of the trinity, is personal territory: my grandmother was born in this region and lived here until the end of the Second World War, and the local cuisine still tastes like the dishes she cooked for me. We return with family, usually just for lunch and a slow walk down the yellow neoclassical boulevard, where nobody hurries and the whole day rolls by as if in slowed time.

In 2021 all three West Bohemian spa towns were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the Great Spa Towns of Europe, one transnational listing shared with Baden-Baden, Vichy, and Bath.

Photographing the Czech Republic

My best Czech frames were made before most people’s alarms went off. In summer the morning blue hour starts around 3am, so I book apartments close to the subject and plan the night like a shoot schedule. It does not always go to plan: one morning I arrived at the main gate of Prague Castle at 3:30 to find it locked, sprinted back down through Malá Strana and up again through the vineyards, and reached the far side just as the sky over the Vltava turned a powerful orange. When I turned around, a guard nodded at me, and the castle gates stood open.

The other constant is improvised support. Tower galleries here are narrow, windy, and hostile to tripods, so a Gorillapod clamped to a railing has produced more of my Prague night photos than the Manfrotto ever has.

When to Visit the Czech Republic

Summer brings long evenings and blue hours at both ends of the night, but also full bridges and squares from mid-morning on; the empty-city photographs are a dawn discipline. Autumn is the season for Bohemian Switzerland, when the forests around the Pravčická Gate turn and the trails stay hikeable. The spa towns work in every season, and the low winter sun through the Gorky Colonnade is its own argument for the cold months.

City breaks concentrate around New Year’s Eve, when thousands fill the riverbanks. I was setting up on the Vltava one December when the display started early and I spun the camera around to catch fireworks bursting over the Rudolfinum. Book far ahead for that week.

Frequently Asked Questions