Prague

A fortified settlement stood on the castle hill by 800, and masonry building there dates from 885 at the latest; the Přemyslid fort of Vyšehrad followed about seventy years later. Merchants from across Europe settled at the ford, the Judith Bridge crossed the river in the 1170s, and in 1257 King Ottokar II founded the Lesser Town below the castle. Under Charles IV, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor from 1346 to 1378, Prague became an imperial capital: he founded Charles University in 1347, laid out the New Town and began Charles Bridge. By the 1470s the city was the third largest in the Empire.

The Jewish quarter was sacked in 1389. Jan Hus preached at the Bethlehem Chapel, and after his execution in 1415 the first defenestration of 1419 opened the Hussite Wars. Rudolf II made the castle a home for astronomers, alchemists and artists, among them Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, but the second defenestration in 1618 set off the Thirty Years' War; after defeat at White Mountain, 27 Protestant leaders were executed on Old Town Square in 1621 and the city was forced back to Catholicism. Fire, plague and Prussian bombardment followed before 18th-century prosperity brought the Baroque palaces and churches.

The four towns were merged in 1784, and industry and the Czech National Revival had made the city overwhelmingly Czech-speaking by the early 20th century. Prague became the capital of Czechoslovakia in 1918. German troops entered in March 1939, most of the Jewish population was deported and killed, and the May 1945 uprising preceded the Red Army's arrival. In 1989 the Velvet Revolution filled its streets, and in 1993 it became capital of the Czech Republic. On 21 December 2023 fourteen people died in a mass shooting at Charles University.

Prague is one of the traditional cultural centres of Europe, and music sits at the heart of it. Mozart's Don Giovanni and La clemenza di Tito had their premieres at the Estates Theatre; the National Theatre is the home of Czech opera; the Czech Philharmonic plays at the Rudolfinum and the Prague Symphony Orchestra at the Municipal House. The Prague Spring festival opens every 12 May with Smetana's Má vlast, and the autumn, organ, jazz and Dvořák festivals fill the rest of the year, alongside hundreds of concert halls, galleries, cinemas and music clubs.

The city is also a museum of architecture — Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque, then Art Nouveau, Cubist and functionalist buildings, Adolf Loos's Villa Müller and the Dancing House. Its Jewish heritage runs from the Old New Synagogue, Europe's oldest active synagogue, to the collections of the Jewish Museum. Writers, film festivals, the Fringe and the World Roma Festival keep a busy calendar, and since 2013 the Signal light festival has taken over the streets each October.

Everyday culture is quieter. The pub is the great social institution, beer has been brewed here since the Břevnov monks of 993, and a greeting on entering a shop or bar is expected. Letná and Wenceslas Square remain the places where the country gathers in moments of protest or celebration.

The city has a population of about 1.4 million, with about 2.3 million in its metropolitan area. Many residents are not registered in the city, so the real number living and working here is higher, and hundreds of thousands of commuters arrive on weekdays. About 350,000 foreign residents were counted in 2025. Prague's population is the oldest and best educated in the country.

The economy produces about a quarter of Czech GDP and is one of the strongest regional economies in the European Union. Services account for about 80 per cent of jobs — finance, trade, public administration, tourism and hospitality — and industry continues in pharmaceuticals, printing, food processing and engineering. The government, parliament, national bank, broadcasters and Radio Free Europe are all based here. Almost half the country's tourism income is spent in the city, which received about 8.3 million overnight guests in 2025, four out of five from abroad.

Inner districts such as Vinohrady, Žižkov, Karlín and Smíchov, once separate towns or suburbs, are where many residents live, eat and drink, away from the tourist streets of Prague 1. Daily life runs on public transport: about 1.2 billion journeys a year are made on the metro, trams and buses, and some 120,000 commuters are among the 800,000 people who work in the city. Wages are well above the national average, and many international film productions have been shot here since the late 1990s.

Prague eats in the Czech tradition, heavy on meat, sauce and dumplings. Bread dumplings, knedlíky, are steamed and sliced like bread and served with most main dishes; roast duck comes with bread or potato dumplings and braised red cabbage; and guláš, a stew of beef, pork or game with onions and spices, is eaten with dumplings or bread, not to be confused with the Hungarian soup. Goulash soup, gulášovka, and broths with liver dumplings are common in Czech restaurants, and klobása is a smoked sausage of minced meat.

Two specialities carry the city's name. Prague ham, pražská šunka, is brine-cured, stewed and mildly smoked over beechwood, first marketed in the 1860s by a butcher on Zvonařka Street and now protected as a Traditional Speciality Guaranteed in the EU; cooked on the bone it is called šunka od kosti. Prague cake, pražský koláč, is a yeast bun topped with cinnamon streusel and filled with vanilla cream. The trdelník, a sugared chimney cake sold all over the Old Town, is popular with visitors but not a traditional Czech food.

Beer is central. The city has long-established brewery pubs such as U Fleků, U Medvídků and the monastery breweries of Strahov and Břevnov, the Staropramen brewery in Smíchov, and many newer microbreweries, while the Old Town, Žižkov and Vinohrady hold hundreds of restaurants, bars and pubs. Prague's restaurants also earned the first Michelin star in post-communist Central Europe, in 2008.