Metravel city quest
City Prague: free walking route “Quest: Old Town and a Hundred Towers” along the sights. 7 points. Approximately 3 h. Quests and legends - straight from your
Prague is called the ‘city of a hundred towers’, but the real number passed a thousand long ago — sharp Gothic spires, Baroque domes, town hall clocks and little water towers. Wars have left this city almost untouched, so its stones still hold their stories: of kings and alchemists, of a craftsman who was blinded, and of a saint who kept silent until his death.
Today you're doing more than taking a walk — you're collecting these secrets one by one. Every tower along the route has a riddle for you: in some places you'll need to count something, in others to spot a detail tourists hurry past. We'll start up on the hill, at the gates of Prague Castle, head down to a bridge whose foundation was laid at a magical moment, and finish at a house that knows how to dance. Head to the first stop — the Castle's main gates on Hradčany Square.
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
Your route starts up on the hill, at Prague Castle — the world's largest ancient castle complex, listed in the Guinness Book of Records. For more than a thousand years, Czech kings and presidents have succeeded one another behind these walls, and a whole city is hidden inside: palaces, gardens, lanes and churches.
Walk through the gates and St Vitus Cathedral rises above you, the principal tower of this ‘city of a hundred towers’. It took almost six hundred years to build: work began under the very same Charles IV who founded the bridge, and was only completed in the twentieth century.
Behind the cathedral hides Golden Lane — a row of toy-like little houses squeezed right into the fortress wall. The palace guards once lived in these cramped quarters, and later, according to legend, alchemists settled here, searching for a way to make gold for Emperor Rudolf II.
Charles IV believed in numbers. The sequence reads the same in both directions, like a spell meant to keep the bridge standing for centuries.
An optional stop — just for pleasure, with no riddles to solve. ‘Café Milani’ is nearby: pop in, catch your breath and talk about what you've seen, then continue the route or finish here.
From the bridge, turn towards Old Town Square — its heart beats on the southern wall of the town hall tower. There you'll find the Orloj, an astronomical clock dating from 1410, the oldest working one in the world.
Head down from Old Town Square to the Vltava embankment and follow the water south — the towers give way to Prague's strangest building. Here stands the ‘Dancing House’: one tower is straight and made of stone, while the other seems to have bowed, wrapped an arm around its partner's waist and begun twirling her in a dance.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.