The Most Beautiful Places in the Czech Republic
32 places · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the Czech Republic are Český Krumlov Castle, Pravčická brána and Charles Bridge. The list covers 32 places. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Bohemia sat at the crossroads of central Europe for a thousand years, and Prague was for a time the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor. Gothic builders under Charles IV, Baroque architects after the Thirty Years' War and Art Nouveau designers around 1900 all left their mark, and unlike many central European capitals Prague came through the Second World War with its historic centre largely intact. Beyond the cities, the sandstone and limestone of the Czech uplands have weathered into rock towns, gorges and caves.
Prague Castle is often called the largest ancient castle complex in the world, and St. Vitus Cathedral at its heart took nearly six centuries to finish, from 1344 to 1929. Below it Charles Bridge crosses the Vltava under a line of Baroque statues, and on Old Town Square the twin Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady before Týn rise behind the Astronomical Clock, which has been telling time since 1410. The Clementinum keeps one of the most ornate Baroque library halls in Europe, and the Old Jewish Cemetery crowds thousands of tombstones into layers of graves.
Outside the capital the range widens. Český Krumlov Castle looms over a bend of the Vltava with a rare surviving Baroque theatre, Hluboká was remade in the 19th century in the image of an English Tudor castle, and the Adršpach-Teplice Rocks form a labyrinth of sandstone towers. Even the 20th century has its place: the Dancing House by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić, finished in 1996.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Český Krumlov Castle | Castle | |
| 2 | Pravčická brána | Natural arch | |
| 3 | Charles Bridge | Bridge | ✓ |
| 4 | Lednice Castle | Palace | |
| 5 | Strahov Monastery Library | Library building | |
| 6 | Adršpach-Teplice Rocks | Rock formation | |
| 7 | St. Barbara's Church, Kutná Hora | Church building | |
| 8 | Karlštejn Castle | Castle | |
| 9 | Prague Castle | Castle | |
| 10 | Dancing House | Monument | |
| 11 | Church of Our Lady before Týn | Church building | |
| 12 | Clementinum | Library building | |
| 13 | St. Vitus Cathedral | Cathedral | |
| 14 | Hluboká Castle | Castle | |
| 15 | Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague | Cemetery | |
| 16 | St. Nicholas Church | Church building | |
| 17 | Kroměříž Castle | Palace | ✓ |
| 18 | Prague Astronomical Clock | Clock tower | |
| 19 | Trosky Castle | Castle ruin | |
| 20 | Spanish Synagogue, Prague | Synagogue | |
| 21 | Villa Tugendhat | Manor house | |
| 22 | Estates Theatre | Opera house | |
| 23 | Dolní Vítkovice | Blast furnace | |
| 24 | Macocha Gorge | Canyon | |
| 25 | Golden Lane | Pedestrian street | |
| 26 | Ještěd Tower | Observation tower | |
| 27 | České Švýcarsko National Park | National park | |
| 28 | Sedlec Ossuary | Church building | |
| 29 | Jubilee Synagogue, Prague | Synagogue | |
| 30 | Pilgrimage Church of St John of Nepomuk at Zelená Hora | Church building | ✓ |
01 Český Krumlov Castle
Český Krumlov
Czech Republic · 21.4 km from České Budějovice48.813° N 14.315° E
Image by Pixel-Sepp from Pixabay Český Krumlov Castle sprawls along a narrow rock ridge above a loop of the Vltava. Only Prague Castle is a larger castle-and-château complex in Bohemia. It was begun in the first third of the 13th century and is first recorded in 1253, when a lord of the Vítkovci family carried the name "of Krumlov".
Did you know? Josef Lederer's Masquerade Hall paintings depict 135 life-size figures, from Harlequin and Columbine to Schwarzenberg guardsmen and village musicians.
02 Pravčická brána
Czech Republic · 28.4 km from Ústí nad Labem50.884° N 14.281° E
Pudelek · CC BY-SA 4.0 Pravčická brána is a bridge of pale sandstone thrown across the sky above the forests of Bohemian Switzerland, and it is the largest natural arch of its kind on the European mainland.
Did you know? Since 1993 instruments have continuously measured movement between the arch's rock blocks; they show no acute danger of collapse.
03 Charles Bridge
Czech Republic · 0.8 km from Prague50.086° N 14.412° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Zef51 from Pixabay The most-repeated story about Charles Bridge is that its mortar was strengthened with eggs, shipped in from towns and villages across Bohemia on the emperor's order.
Did you know? The bridge is about 516 metres long and 9.5 metres wide, carried across the Vltava on 16 arches.
04 Lednice Castle
Zámek Lednice
Czech Republic48.801° N 16.806° E
Image by Simy27 from Pixabay Lednice Castle looks as though it had been lifted from the English countryside and set down in southern Moravia: a white palace of pinnacles, battlements and pointed windows, standing on the right bank of the Dyje (Thaya) amid one of the largest designed landscapes in Europe.
Did you know? Prince Alois II, who ordered the neo-Gothic rebuilding, had represented the emperor at Queen Victoria's coronation and collected watercolours of English houses by Joseph Nash.
05 Strahov Monastery Library
Strahovský klášter
Czech Republic · 2.4 km from Prague50.086° N 14.389° E
Barnos · CC BY-SA 4.0 High on the hill behind Prague Castle, the Premonstratensian canons have kept their monastery at Strahov since 1143, when it was founded by Duke Vladislaus II and Bishop Jindřich Zdík after a first attempt three years earlier had failed.
Did you know? Spiral staircases hidden in the corners of the Philosophical Hall lead up to the gallery that runs along its upper shelves.
06 Adršpach-Teplice Rocks
Czech Republic50.611° N 16.115° E
Lestat (Jan Mehlich) · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Adršpach-Teplice Rocks in north-eastern Bohemia are the largest rock city in Central Europe: a labyrinth of sandstone towers, walls and gorges formed when a continuous plateau of sandstone, laid down in a Cretaceous sea, was split by tectonic movement and then carved by water, frost and wind.
Did you know? Local rules forbid adding new protection to established routes, so modern climbers face the towers on exactly the terms the pioneers did.
07 St. Barbara's Church, Kutná Hora
Chrám svaté Barbory
Czech Republic · 37.1 km from Pardubice49.945° N 15.264° E
Thomas Ledl · CC BY-SA 4.0 St. Barbara's Church in Kutná Hora is the cathedral of a town made rich by silver, and it was built to say so. Dedicated to the patron saint of miners, it was begun in 1388 by Johann Parler, son of the great Peter Parler of Prague, then stood unfinished for more than sixty years when the Hussite wars stopped work.
Did you know? Some sources say the nave was planned twice as long; when silver output fell, work stopped in 1558 and a temporary wall closed the west end.
08 Karlštejn Castle
Karlštejn
Czech Republic · 23.5 km from Prague49.940° N 14.188° E
Image by martinpalata from Pixabay Karlštejn rises in tiers above a wooded valley of the Berounka, its walls and towers stepping up the rock from the imperial palace to the Marian Tower and finally to the massive Great Tower at the summit.
Did you know? Master Theodoric's cycle originally had 130 panels; one, perhaps showing St Martha or St Cecilia, has been lost.
09 Prague Castle
Pražský hrad
Czech Republic · 1.7 km from Prague50.090° N 14.400° E
Image by peter89ba from Pixabay Few castles have been a seat of power for as long as this one. The first walled church on the ridge above the Vltava went up around 870, and more than eleven centuries later the complex is still the office of the Czech head of state.
Did you know? Vladislav Hall, 62 metres long with a vault spanning 16 metres, was big enough for knightly tournaments, so its staircase was built wide enough for horses.
10 Dancing House
Tančící dům
Czech Republic · 1.4 km from Prague50.076° N 14.414° E
Image by pierre9x6 from Pixabay On the Vltava embankment in Prague, among rows of 19th-century apartment houses, one building seems to sway: a glass tower pinched at the waist leans against a solid partner whose windows bob up and down across a rippling façade.
Did you know? The earlier house on the site was destroyed in an American air raid on 14 February 1945.
11 Church of Our Lady before Týn
Kostel Panny Marie před Týnem
Czech Republic · 0.1 km from Prague50.088° N 14.423° E
Image by Leonhard_Niederwimmer from Pixabay The two dark spires of the Týn Church, each bristling with smaller turrets, form the backdrop of Prague's Old Town Square. They are the image most people carry home from the city.
Did you know? Brahe's hair contained gold at 20 to 100 times today's typical levels, perhaps from gilded tableware, alchemical elixirs or his laboratory work.
12 Clementinum
Klementinum
Czech Republic · 0.5 km from Prague50.087° N 14.416° E
VitVit · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Clementinum is less a single building than a small town of learning, folded into the Old Town of Prague a few steps from the Charles Bridge.
Did you know? The Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Joseph Stepling founded the observatory in the tower in the early 1750s.
13 St. Vitus Cathedral
Katedrála svatého Víta v Praze
Czech Republic · 1.7 km from Prague50.091° N 14.401° E
Image by Duernsteiner from Pixabay St Vitus Cathedral, formally dedicated to Saints Vitus, Wenceslaus and Adalbert, is the seat of the Archbishop of Prague and the largest and most important church in the Czech Republic. 8 m high, and holds the tombs of Bohemian kings and Holy Roman emperors.
Did you know? Mucha's window of Saints Cyril and Methodius was paid for by the Slavia bank, and the artist worked the bank's emblem, a female figure of Slavia, into the design.
14 Hluboká Castle
Zámek Hluboká nad Vltavou
Czech Republic · 8 km from České Budějovice49.051° N 14.442° E
Michal Klajban · CC BY 4.0 Rising above the woods and the Vltava valley north of České Budějovice, Hluboká looks less like a Bohemian castle than a piece of Victorian England set down in South Bohemia.
Did you know? Before the Neo-Gothic makeover, the castle had been rebuilt in Baroque style in the 18th century by Pavel Ignác Bayer and Antonín Erhard Martinelli.
15 Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague
Czech Republic · 0.5 km from Prague50.090° N 14.417° E
Image by Nicolas-Debray from Pixabay The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague's Josefov is one of the most important Jewish burial grounds in Europe, and one of the most affecting places in the city. More than 12,000 tombstones stand here, packed so closely that they lean against one another in every direction.
Did you know? A low mound called the Nephele holds children who died before the age of one month, along with remains found during the clearance of the old ghetto.
16 St. Nicholas Church
Kostel svatého Mikuláše na Malé Straně
Czech Republic · 1.4 km from Prague50.088° N 14.404° E
VitVit · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Church of St Nicholas dominates the Lesser Town of Prague with its great copper dome and slender bell tower, and inside it is often called the finest Baroque church in the city.
Did you know? The tower's only bell, called Mikuláš and weighing about 350 kilograms, was cast in 1526, long before the present church existed.
17 Kroměříž Castle
Czech Republic · 20.3 km from Zlín49.300° N 17.393° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Pudelek (Marcin Szala) · CC BY-SA 4.0 For centuries the small Moravian town of Kroměříž was the summer seat of the bishops — from 1777 archbishops — of Olomouc, and their residence here, together with two very different gardens, was listed as a World Heritage Site in 1998.
18 Prague Astronomical Clock
Staroměstský orloj
Czech Republic · 0.2 km from Prague50.087° N 14.421° E
Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay The Prague Orloj is a medieval astronomical clock set into the south wall of the Old Town Hall on Old Town Square, and it has been telling time, and a good deal more, since 1410.
Did you know? According to legend, the blinded clockmaker took revenge by disabling the clock, and nobody could repair it for a hundred years.
19 Trosky Castle
Czech Republic · 33.3 km from Liberec50.516° N 15.231° E
Zdeněk Fiedler · CC BY-SA 3.0 Trosky is one of the most recognisable silhouettes in the Czech Republic: two towers perched on two separate volcanic plugs, rising abruptly out of the farmland of the Bohemian Paradise in the Liberec Region. The plugs are the hardened throats of an ancient volcano that pushed up through the surrounding sandstones.
Did you know? Between the towers, the western part of the castle core was once occupied by a multi-room palace built of wood.
20 Spanish Synagogue, Prague
Španělská synagoga
Czech Republic · 0.4 km from Prague50.090° N 14.421° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Of the synagogues in Prague's old Jewish Town, Josefov, the Spanish Synagogue is the youngest and by far the most ornate. It stands on the site of the Altschul, the "Old School", an older synagogue that it replaced.
Did you know? A functionalist annex designed by the architect Karel Pecánek was added beside the synagogue in 1935.
21 Villa Tugendhat
Vila Tugendhat
Czech Republic · 0.9 km from Brno49.207° N 16.616° E
Thomas Ledl · CC BY 4.0 From the street, Villa Tugendhat in Brno looks almost modest: a low, flat-roofed white volume at the top of a sloping garden. Only on the garden side does the house reveal itself, opening into a single vast living floor walled in glass, with a panoramic view across the city to Špilberk Castle.
Did you know? The philosopher Ernst Tugendhat, son of Fritz and Greta, spent his early childhood in the house.
22 Estates Theatre
Stavovské divadlo
Czech Republic · 0.1 km from Prague50.086° N 14.424° E
VitVit · CC BY-SA 4.0 Prague's Estates Theatre is the one working playhouse in the world where Mozart himself conducted the first performance of an opera still in the repertoire.
Did you know? The first Czech opera, František Škroup's The Tinker, had its premiere here on 2 February 1826.
23 Dolní Vítkovice
Dolní oblast Vítkovice
Czech Republic · 2.4 km from Ostrava49.820° N 18.280° E
Image by ferdinandkozeluh0 from Pixabay Dolní Vítkovice — Lower Vítkovice — is the heart of the ironworks that made Ostrava the steel city of Central Europe, preserved after the fires went out rather than cleared away.
Did you know? After an overhaul in 1988, Blast Furnace No. 1 ranked among Europe's most modern and could produce up to 300,000 tonnes of special and foundry iron a year.
24 Macocha Gorge
Macocha
Czech Republic · 21.1 km from Brno49.373° N 16.730° E
Jerzy Strzelecki · CC BY-SA 3.0 5 metres deep to the surface of the lake at its bottom — the deepest chasm of its kind in Central Europe. It measures about 174 by 76 metres, wide enough for daylight to reach the floor, which puts it in the category of "light hole" abysses.
Did you know? In 1748 a team of miners descended into the chasm at the initiative of Johann Anton Nagel, although Nagel himself stayed at the top.
25 Golden Lane
Zlatá ulička
Czech Republic · 1.5 km from Prague50.092° N 14.404° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Golden Lane — Zlatá ulička in Czech — is a single row of tiny houses tucked against the northern wall of Prague Castle, so small that a tall visitor has to stoop at many of the doorways.
Did you know? In the 19th century residents charged curious visitors a fee to peer from their windows into the Stag Moat, which was otherwise closed to the public.
26 Ještěd Tower
Ještěd
Czech Republic · 10.1 km from Liberec50.733° N 14.985° E
Image by ivabalk from Pixabay From almost anywhere in Liberec you can see it: on the bare summit of Ještěd, 1,012 metres up and about six kilometres from the town centre, stands a silver cone that looks less like a building than like something that has landed.
Did you know? An 800 kg ring-shaped pendulum hung at the very top of the mast damps the swaying caused by the summit winds.
27 České Švýcarsko National Park
Národní park České Švýcarsko
Czech Republic · 32.8 km from Ústí nad Labem50.883° N 14.389° E
Huhulenik · CC BY 3.0 České Švýcarsko, Bohemian Switzerland, is the Czech half of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, a landscape of sandstone towers, walls, ravines and table hills on the right bank of the Elbe northeast of Děčín.
Did you know? The sand that became these rocks was washed by rivers from today’s Krkonoše and Jizera Mountains into a sea that covered the area 90 million years ago.
28 Sedlec Ossuary
Kostel Všech svatých
Czech Republic · 34.9 km from Pardubice49.962° N 15.288° E
H2k4 · CC BY-SA 3.0 Beneath the small Gothic cemetery church of All Saints in Sedlec, a suburb of Kutná Hora, lies one of the strangest interiors in Europe.
Did you know? In 1970 the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer made a short film about the ossuary, set to a jazz score by Zdeněk Liška.
29 Jubilee Synagogue, Prague
Jeruzalémská synagoga
Czech Republic · 0.7 km from Prague50.085° N 14.432° E
Image by Laura_Maxim from Pixabay The Jubilee Synagogue is the most colourful building in Prague's New Town, and one of the most unexpected.
Did you know? Construction took just fifteen months, from 26 June 1905 to its consecration on 16 September 1906, the festival of Simchat Torah.
30 Pilgrimage Church of St John of Nepomuk at Zelená Hora
Kostel svatého Jana Nepomuckého
Czech Republic · 32.8 km from Jihlava49.580° N 15.942° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Aqalexor · CC BY-SA 4.0 On a low hill called Zelená Hora, the Green Mountain, above the town of Žďár nad Sázavou, stands a church that seems to have been drawn with a compass and a star.
Did you know? The church rises in three storeys, which has been read as an allusion to the papal triple crown and to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
More about Pilgrimage Church of St John of Nepomuk at Zelená Hora →
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in the Czech Republic?
- On our list, Český Krumlov Castle ranks first, followed by Pravčická brána and Charles Bridge.
- How old is the Prague Astronomical Clock?
- Its oldest part, the astronomical dial, dates from 1410, making it the oldest astronomical clock in the world that is still working. The procession of apostles was added much later.
- How long did it take to build St. Vitus Cathedral?
- Construction began in 1344 under Charles IV, stalled for centuries during the Hussite Wars and after, and the cathedral was only completed in 1929.
- Why are the graves stacked in Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery?
- The cemetery could not expand beyond the ghetto, so new soil was added on top of old graves and older tombstones were raised to the new surface, leaving several layers of burials beneath the crowded stones.
- What kinds of places are there to see in the Czech Republic?
- In our collection, the places in the Czech Republic are most often churches (6), castles (5), country houses (3) and synagogues (2).
- How many places are on this list in the Czech Republic?
- The list covers 32 places.