Prague ParksA quick guide to the city's plentiful green spaces
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During summertime, the parks are the reason to be here. This may sound like a big claim, considering all the great things Prague has to offer, but if you just visit a few of them you may come away with a very different sense of the city than that which you get in the middle of Wenceslas Square smelling fried grease in the air. We're going to take a whirlwind tour of the most popular parks in the city, beginning with Kampa, to give you a brief overview of what's out there. KAMPA Kampa island (Ostrov Kampa) snuggles against the Malá Strana coast. (We could be convinced that it's actually a chunk of riverbank with a canal cut around it, rather than a proper island, but leave that to semantics.) Here's the canal:  Walk its length to get some amazing pictures of the old waterwheels once used to power mills in this area. Kampa park also houses Museum Kampa, which has a great collection of modern Central European art. Their motto is, "If a nation's culture survives, then so too does the nation." It's the big white building in the scene below. At least visit the courtyard, open to the public, if not the entire museum.  Also, there are public toilets right next door where you can pay a few crowns and pee under blue neon lights weird enough for a UFO. Kampa can be crowded on the weekends. It's located in the main tourist corridor and its grassy lawn is perfect for laying around doing nothing more than watching the pears ripen on the trees overhead. The picture below looks toward Museum Kampa, with the Charles Bridge about a hundred meters behind you. The distance between them is filled with a good selection of restaurants, outdoor cafés, and plaques marking how high the water rose in the 2002 flood. Find one and see how far under you'd be.  PETŘÍN Moving away from the river, we go up the hill into Petřínské sady gardens. You can enter the park in Malá Strana and come out in Smíchov if you like -- it's a pretty big one, and hilly too. In the next shot you're looking towards the castle, standing on the slope of the apple and pear orchard. If you walk from here to the castle you'll go up and around the rim of a quarry where they cut stone during the building of the city. Now the quarry is covered with these trees, but you can still tell by its shape -- really steep hills in a horseshoe-shaped ring. Show up in mid-September for free fruit and then come back in the winter for some death-defying iced slopes!  Here's a look at the cherry orchard in early May, when the white petals rain down on kissing couples. If that and the free cherries aren't enough, you can find a few pubs built right into the hillside just around the edge of these trees.  Here's a view from the grass under the cherry trees:  The next picture is a monument to the victims of the Communist era. It stands at the bottom of the park directly in line with the Most Legií, the bridge that connects to the Národní divadlo (National Theater) on the other side of the river. Within a few feet of this monument you can catch the funicular going up Petřín hill. The funicular is a little cable car that will take you to the top of the hill, saving your legs a trip, and you can use your normal metro pass on it. At the top you will find rose gardens, the mirror labyrinth, a few churches, and of course the Petřínská rozhledna (Petřín tower). The tower is a replica of the Eiffel Tower and is one of the more recognizable landmarks on the city's skyline. Look for it at night to the left of the castle. Here's the monument:  VOJANOVY SADY Moving from this monument back towards Kampa park and the Charles Bridge, we completely blow right past Vojanovy sady, one of the secret gardens in Malá Strana. This is an absolutely gorgeous garden. Despite being smack in the center of the bustle, it's quiet like a cemetery, with goldfish ponds and peacocks, fruit trees and tomatoes, roses, a mob of fig trees, and plenty of benches to put to good use. Yes, I said peacocks. Here's the gate to get in:  LETNÁ Now we'll jump across the whole Castle property and land in Letenské sady (Letná park), high above the city. Here's the view:  The church with two black steeples is the Týn church, right on Old Town Square. Incidentally, the green space right behind it is Riegrovy sady, which we'll be seeing later on this little tour. Of course nobody could fail to point out our beloved TV tower, standing proudly off to the left of the picture. Let's tour Letná. Here's a look at one of the paths in the newly reconstructed area. You'll find a kids' play area and a nice lawn here at the edge of the beer garden.  Just ahead we find the famed Letná beer garden. See all these tables? They'll be totally filled almost every night of the week during summer.  Letná is great for sports. Its mostly flat; there are long newly paved paths screaming out to the rollerbladers, wide open places to throw Frisbees and fly kites, and shaded playgrounds for kids. See if this picture makes you want to lace up your skates:  Here's a peek at a more secluded lunch spot next to the clay tennis courts, with cool shadows.  And the courts themselves:  STROMOVKA Leaving Letná we move down the hill and away from the city into Stromovka, the big daddy. Here's what you'll see a few steps after entering the park from Kamenická street, which also has a tram stop ready to get you there and back.  Continue downhill until the terrain flattens out and you'll eventually get to the pond with this fountain and ducks.  At one point in the history of the country this park was the royal hunting grounds. You can enter from Letná and exit the park all the way up at Troja, by the zoo. There's another entrance to Stromovka on the Holešovice side, at Výstaviště. This is a massive exhibition area with nearby planetarium and amusement park. Here are the exhibition grounds, accessible by tram:  And here's a pirate ship battling it out with an octopus in the amusement park:  Stromovka has a lot more to offer than we can cover in this madcap sprint through Prague's parks. Rest assured that ye who love the outdoors won't be disappointed. RIEGROVY SADY Moving on to one of the more crowded parks, we climb up behind the Hlavní nádraží train station into Riegrovy sady. You'll see pétanque, Frisbee and small football games going on here -- all the good sports that go with drinking cold beer. Lately, a group of local acrobats have been stringing tightropes between the trees seen below:  Here's a perfect climbing tree for the little ones:  This is the sun setting on the field leading down to Vinohradská street.  Now this is a picture of the most popular spot in Riegrovy sady, apart from the beer garden. It's the slope where everyone sits to watch the sunset. You're looking due west towards the castle on the right and Petřín hill (with tower) on the left.  From this field, walk around 200 meters to the right to get to the beer garden, and spend many a happy hour there, up to the nose in foam. The Riegrovy sady and Letná beer gardens are definitely the most crowded in the city. VYŠEHRAD For a quieter spot to have a klobása (sausage) and Gambrinus, head up to Vyšehrad. It's a fortress sitting high above the city, with foundations dating back a thousand years. Is that interesting yet? Here's a look at the grill and bike rack in the Vyšehrad beer garden.  This is a view looking south along the Vltava. Those are new grapevines on the right side of the frame.  Here's a wall of roses that are enough to make you want to get married, just so you can have your pictures taken with them. These are growing along the wall of a ruined 12th century church. You can ask the lady at the snack shop for the keys to go in and look at the archaeological exhibit. For more details see the Vyšehrad is for Lovers post on the City Beat weblog. Lastly, put this in your brain and remember it when you're staring at a map: the word "sady" in Czech means "gardens." If you're looking for a park, look for "sady" and you'll be in good shape. Now back to the roses: 
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