Czech Republic

🇨🇿 Czech Republic

Brno

Brno is the capital of Moravia and the Czech Republic's second city — 380,000 people, a UNESCO World Heritage villa (Villa Tugendhat, 1930, Mies van der Rohe), a preserved Renaissance-era Capuchin Crypt with 18th-century mummies, a massive hilltop castle (Špilberk, which served as the Habsburg Empire's most feared prison for over a century), and a working city that functions without the tourist overlay that has made Prague's old town increasingly difficult to love. Brno has the oldest Augustinian monastery in Central Europe (where Gregor Mendel discovered the laws of genetics by growing peas in the monastery garden), an excellent university-driven café and bar scene, and access to the Moravian wine region (the Pálava Hills, 30 minutes south, are the warmest wine region in Central Europe and produce exceptional Riesling and Welschriesling). Best months: May–June (spring, wine blossom season) and September–October (harvest, Pálava wine festivals).

🇨🇿 Czech Republic

Ostrava

Ostrava is the Czech Republic's third city and its industrial capital — a city shaped by 200 years of coal mining and steel production in the Moravian-Silesian coalfield that produced the Vitkovice Ironworks (founded 1828, a UNESCO candidate), the extraordinary cultural transformation of industrial heritage into arts spaces, and a landscape of mine towers, slag heaps and redbrick factories that the city is now ingeniously repurposing as one of Central Europe's most interesting post-industrial cultural cities. Ostrava sits on the historical border triangle of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia — an ethnically mixed region that has been Czech, Polish, German and Habsburg at various points and still has the largest Polish minority in the Czech Republic in the Zaolzie border area. The Dolní Vítkovice complex — the 19th-century ironworks including blast furnaces, coking plant and gas holder — has been transformed into a concert and conference venue, restaurant and museum complex that hosted headline acts (Metallica, U2) in the blast furnace precinct; the annual Colours of Ostrava music festival (held in the ironworks in July) regularly attracts 40,000 visitors. Ostrava is also the gateway to the Beskydy Mountains (Czech-Slovak Carpathian range) and the open-air museum at Rožnov pod Radhoštěm (the largest open-air folk architecture museum in Central Europe). The city's beer culture is exceptional — Ostrava beer halls serve Pilsner Urquell directly from unpasteurised tanks (tank beer is the highest quality lager form available in Czech Republic, unavailable outside the country).

🇨🇿 Czech Republic

Prague

Prague (Praha — the "Mother of Cities" according to Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, who transformed it into the largest city in Europe in the 14th century) is the best-preserved medieval city in Europe: the only major city that escaped both the Baroque rebuilding of the 17th–18th centuries AND the bombing of the Second World War (it was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945 with its cathedral, castle, Jewish Quarter and Charles Bridge intact). The result is a layered city where Gothic, Baroque, Art Nouveau, Cubist (Prague has the finest Cubist architecture in the world) and Communist-era architecture coexist without contradiction, and where the Vltava River curls beneath the castle hill and medieval bridges as it has for 1,000 years. Prague is also one of the cheapest capitals in Central Europe, has the finest beer tradition in the world (Pilsner Urquell was invented in Bohemia in 1842), and the most beautiful main square in Europe — the Old Town Square with its 600-year-old Astronomical Clock.