Ostrava is the cheapest big city in Czechia: pints run 35–50 Kč, a full lunch menu costs 130–170 Kč and half the industrial landscape is open-air and free. Three days here on 800 Kč a day is comfortable, not spartan.
The whole industrial campus between the blast furnaces, gasholder and coking plant is a public street you can cross for free — only the Bolt Tower lift and Big World of Technology charge. Open daylight hours; paths signed from Vítkovice-Hlubina gate.
The second-largest church in Moravia (1889, seats 4,000) charges nothing to enter. Neo-Renaissance interior, twin 67 m towers, quiet even at noon. Generally open 09:00–17:00 outside services; a donation box replaces any ticket.
A 100-hectare park wedged between the river and the ironworks, with free-entry paths, the Sýkorův bridge lookout and outdoor gym stations. Locals cycle the asphalt trail to Vítkovice in 20 minutes; benches face the furnaces.
The rail viaduct walls and Černá Louka exhibition grounds carry Ostrava's biggest legal graffiti runs, redone every summer. Free, unfenced, best light after 17:00 when the bridge throws shadows across the river.
Ostrava's central open market, Mon–Sat mornings: Moravian apples, smoked klobása, pickled hermelín and 20 Kč langoš stalls. Traders pack up around 13:00, so prices drop sharply after noon on produce.
A survivor of the socialist canteen era: soup, main and a drink for 130–160 Kč, served 11:00–14:30 weekdays. Svíčková, guláš with six bread dumplings, or fried cheese. Order at the counter, pay at the till.
The mall food hall is tourist-priced, but the Albert hypermarket downstairs sells hot roast pork, potato salad and 12 Kč rohlíky by weight. Czech backpackers assemble dinner here for under 100 Kč a head.
A working-class beer hall away from Stodolní where a half-litre of Radegast runs 35–42 Kč and utopenec costs 55 Kč. No English menu, no card machine some evenings, tables shared with ironworks retirees.
A 315 m mining spoil heap in Slezská Ostrava that still burns internally — the ground is warm and steams in winter, and rare heat-loving plants grow on it. Free, unfenced, 30-minute climb from Bohumínská street.
A 24-hour city ticket costs 100 Kč and covers every tram, bus and trolleybus. Line 8 runs west through Mariánské Hory into Poruba's 1950s Socialist Realist boulevards — an hour of free-ish sightseeing from a tram window.
Europe's largest mining museum sits in a free-entry public park above the Odra. The underground pit tour costs around 200 Kč, but the outdoor machinery, miners' bath house exterior and Landek hill trails cost nothing.
The 1913 bridge over the Ostravice gives the free counterpart to the Bolt Tower view: furnaces upstream, the New Town Hall observation tower downstream, and cyclists commuting between them on the riverside trail.