Prague Audio Tours

Prague has been called the City of a Hundred Spires since the medieval period, though the actual count is closer to 500. Stand on the Charles Bridge at dawn, when the tour groups have not yet arrived and the Vltava River is quiet below you, and you will understand why the city earned that name. The 14th-century bridge connects the Old Town to the Lesser Town with 30 Baroque statues watching from the parapets, and the view toward Prague Castle above it is one of the most genuinely affecting urban panoramas in Europe. Charles IV built the bridge in 1357, ordered construction of St Vitus Cathedral, founded Charles University as the oldest in Central Europe, and effectively turned Prague into one of the most important cities on the continent. It took the Thirty Years War to bring it back down to size.

The Old Town Square is the center of gravity for most visitors, and rightly so.

The astronomical clock installed in 1410, the third-oldest in the world still operating, draws crowds every hour on the hour when its mechanical figures emerge. The adjacent Josefov quarter, the old Jewish ghetto, contains the Old New Synagogue built in 1270, still in regular use, and the Old Jewish Cemetery where twelve layers of burials accumulated over several centuries because the community was forbidden from burying their dead elsewhere. Kafka was born nearby and set his bureaucratic nightmares partly in these labyrinthine streets.