Prague in 5 days: the New Town and a day trip to Kutná Hora

Five days in Prague add the new town — Wenceslas Square and the Dancing House, twentieth-century architecture alongside the medieval city — and a day trip out of town: the Sedlec Ossuary in Kutná Hora, one of the most shocking and famous images of Bohemia.

Days 1-3 — The classic tour

The same three days described in the 3-day itinerary: Old Town and Castle, Malá Strana and Josefov, Vyšehrad and Petřín.

Day 4 — The new town

Full day · from contemporary architecture to the square of the Velvet Revolution

1 – The Dancing House

Time: one hour, on the way

Designed by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić and completed in 1996 on the site of a building destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945, the Dancing House (nicknamed “Fred and Ginger” for its two towers that look like a dancing couple) was initially controversial among Praguers for its contrast with the surrounding architecture. Today it is one of the city’s most photographed buildings and houses a panoramic bar on the top floor.

2 – Wenceslas Square

Time: a couple of hours

More a boulevard than a square — seven hundred fifty metres long — Wenceslas Square is the centre of modern Prague and the stage for the most dramatic moments of twentieth-century Czech history: here crowds gathered for independence in 1918, here student Jan Palach set himself on fire in January 1969 in protest against the Soviet invasion, and here, in November 1989, half a million people demonstrated during the Velvet Revolution that ended the communist regime within a few weeks, without bloodshed.

Day 5 — Day trip to Kutná Hora

Day trip from Prague · 70 km, 1 hour by train

Between the 14th and 16th centuries, Kutná Hora was one of the richest cities in Europe thanks to its silver mines, which helped finance the Bohemian royal court in part. Today it is best known for the Sedlec Ossuary: a small Gothic chapel decorated with the bones of roughly forty thousand people, arranged into chandeliers, coats of arms and garlands by a woodcarver, František Rint, in the late 19th century. The bones come largely from the 14th-century plague epidemics and the 15th-century Hussite wars, when the abbey’s small cemetery — made “holy ground” by a handful of earth brought from Jerusalem in the 13th century — became the most sought-after burial site in Bohemia.

Kutná Hora’s historic centre, a UNESCO World Heritage site, also deserves a visit for St Barbara’s Cathedral, dedicated to the patron saint of miners, with Gothic flying buttresses that look like a stone crown.

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