What to know before travelling around Czechia

How many people go and where they stay

Czechia recorded 22.8 million guests in registered accommodation in 2024, who spent 57.3 million nights, the first year in which the figures exceeded those of the pre-pandemic year 2019. Slightly more than half of those guests, 54%, were domestic, and the number of domestic arrivals actually fell by 0.7% while foreign arrivals rose.

The recovery has continued. In the second quarter of 2025 hotels, guesthouses and other registered accommodation took 6.3 million guests who spent over 15 million nights, with arrivals up 5.6% and overnight stays up 6.9% on the same quarter of 2024. Foreign stays grew faster than domestic ones, at 8.8% against 5.3%, and the split had moved to 53.3% domestic and 46.7% foreign. The average stay was 3.38 days, which is short, and it is the number that best describes how the country is visited.

Germany supplies by far the largest group of foreign visitors, with almost 600,000 arrivals in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, followed by Slovakia at over 150,000. The fastest-growing markets in the second quarter of 2025 were much further away: Ireland up 33.6%, Argentina up 28.6% and Japan up 23.4%.

Why almost everyone stops in Prague

Prague took more than 2.2 million visitors in the second quarter of 2025, which is more than a third of all arrivals in the country. The two regions behind it are a long way behind: South Moravia at 625,000 and South Bohemia at 494,000.

The concentration is easy to explain and worth resisting. The historic centre of Prague was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1992, the city survived the twentieth century with its medieval and Baroque fabric largely intact, and it is compact enough to walk. Everything a first visit wants is inside a few square kilometres, which is also why those few square kilometres are as crowded as they are. The counter-argument is arithmetic. Seventeen properties are on the World Heritage List and only one of them is Prague. Český Krumlov and Telč were inscribed in the same year as the capital, in 1992, and both are small enough to see in a day.

What the rest of the list holds

The inscribed sites are spread across the country and they are unusually varied for a territory this size. Kutná Hora, inscribed in 1995 for its historic centre together with the church of St Barbara and the cathedral at Sedlec, was a silver-mining town rich enough in the Middle Ages to rival the capital. Kroměříž contributes gardens and a castle, inscribed in 1998, and Holašovice a whole preserved village of vernacular Baroque farmhouses from the same year.

Others are single buildings with outsized significance. The pilgrimage church of St John of Nepomuk at Zelená Hora, inscribed in 1994, is Santini's Baroque Gothic geometry at its most extreme. The Tugendhat Villa in Brno, inscribed in 2001, is one of the founding buildings of modern architecture. The Holy Trinity Column in Olomouc, inscribed in 2000, is a plague column raised to the scale of a small building. Litomyšl Castle followed in 1999 and the Jewish Quarter and St Procopius' Basilica in Třebíč in 2003.

Three inscriptions cover whole regions rather than sites. The Lednice-Valtice cultural region in south Moravia, inscribed in 1996, is a designed estate of parkland, follies and avenues covering nearly two hundred square kilometres. The Erzgebirge mining region, inscribed in 2019, spans the German border and records five centuries of ore extraction. The Great Spa Towns of Europe, inscribed in 2021, include the Bohemian spa triangle of Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně and Františkovy Lázně. Two more inscriptions cover working countryside: the breeding and training grounds for ceremonial carriage horses at Kladruby nad Labem, added in 2019, and Žatec with the hop-growing country around it, added in 2023, where the hops that made Czech brewing what it is have been cultivated for centuries.

What the weather does through the year

The climate is mixed, with continental influences producing large swings in temperature and rainfall, and oceanic moderation weakening from west to east. Temperatures across the lower parts of the country are fairly uniform: the mean annual temperature is 7 °C at Cheb in the far west and rises only to 9 °C at Brno in southern Moravia.

Rainfall varies far more than temperature. Annual precipitation runs from 450 mm in the central Bohemian basins to more than 1,500 mm on the windward slopes of the Krkonoše mountains in the north. The wettest month is July and the driest February, which matters for planning: a summer trip is the warmest and also the most likely to be rained on.

There are no broad climate zones, only a succession of small and varied districts following the topography, so conditions can differ sharply over short distances. The practical consequences are that the mountains hold winter sport, the Bohemian basins are the dry part of the country, and the shoulder seasons of late spring and early autumn give the best combination of open sites and thin crowds.

Where to go beyond the capital

South Moravia is the second destination by arrivals and works on wine rather than beer. The vineyards run along the Austrian border, the Lednice-Valtice estate sits among them, and Brno, the second city, holds the Tugendhat Villa, both supreme courts and the Constitutional Court, and a university population that gives it a different character from Prague.

South Bohemia is the third, built around Český Krumlov, the fishpond country around Třeboň dug in the sixteenth century, and Holašovice. Western Bohemia holds the spa triangle and Plzeň, where pilsner was invented and is still brewed. The northern mountains, the Krkonoše and the Jizera range, carry the winter sport and the country's highest ground at Sněžka, 1,603 metres.

The eastern and north-eastern regions see the fewest visitors. Olomouc has a preserved centre and the plague column; the Moravian Karst holds caves and gorges; and the Beskydy and the industrial cities of Ostrava and Zlín are where a visitor finds the twentieth century rather than the seventeenth. Ostrava in particular has turned its closed coal and steel works into exhibition space rather than demolishing them, which makes it the one place in the country where the industrial past is the attraction rather than the thing the attraction survived. Distances are small throughout. The country covers 78,871 square kilometres, of which 34.0% is forest, and no two points in it are more than a few hours apart by road, so a trip that would be a single region elsewhere can take in three here. The practical limit is not distance but the short average stay: at 3.38 days most visitors see one city and one day trip, and the second and third destinations on any list stay empty because of it.

What to eat and drink on the road

Eating out is straightforward and unusually cheap for western European visitors, and the traditional menu is short enough to learn in a day. The standard main course is meat with a sauce or gravy and a side of dumplings or potatoes, and the dishes worth ordering by name are roast pork with dumplings and cabbage, svíčková na smetaně, Czech goulash and schnitzel with potato salad. A meal traditionally opens with soup. Beer is the reason a good many people come, and it rewards specificity. A brewery is recorded in the country from 993, and pale lager as the world now drinks it was created in Plzeň in the nineteenth century, where Pilsner Urquell is still brewed. Almost every region has small breweries alongside the large ones, and the difference between a beer served from a tank in the brewery town and the same brand exported is considerable.

South Moravia works the other way round. The wine country along the Austrian border produces mostly white, sold young and locally, and the wine cellars of the villages are the region's equivalent of the Bohemian pub. A visitor who orders beer in a Moravian wine village and wine in a Bohemian brewery town will get both, and will have missed the point of each.

Away from the restaurants the country still forages. Mushroom and berry picking in late summer and early autumn is a general pastime rather than a specialist hobby, which is worth knowing if a walk in a forest at that time of year seems unexpectedly busy.

Where Czech rail and bus lines run

Czechia is dense with railways and buses, and both are cheap by western European standards. The network centres on Prague, as everything in the country does, but the second-order connections between regional capitals are better than in most countries of similar size, and rail reaches almost every town worth stopping in.

Driving is on the right and the vehicle code is CZ. Motorways require a toll sticker, and the road network is good between the main cities and slower on the regional routes that cross the highland interior. Distances are short enough that a car is a convenience rather than a necessity, and in Prague it is neither.

Public transport inside the cities is the part that surprises visitors. Prague, Brno and Ostrava all run integrated networks of metro, tram and bus on a single ticket, trams are the backbone in most towns above a certain size, and services run frequently and late. Tickets are sold by time rather than by ride, cover every mode within the period they run for, and have to be validated on boarding. Failing to validate is the single most common way for a visitor to acquire a fine, and inspectors work the tram lines that serve the tourist districts hardest.

Why Czechia keeps the koruna

The currency is the Czech koruna, not the euro. Card payment is accepted almost everywhere, and prices quoted in euros in tourist areas of Prague are usually quoted at a poor rate. The country keeps one time zone, an hour ahead of Coordinated Universal Time in winter and two ahead in summer.

Emergency numbers are worth knowing before arrival. The general European number 112 works everywhere and connects to all services. The national numbers can also be dialled directly: 155 for the ambulance service, 150 for the fire service, 158 for the police and 156 for the municipal police.

Power is 230 volts on the European two-pin standard, Europlug and Type E, so continental European appliances work unchanged and British and North American ones need an adapter. Czech is the language of the country, English is widely spoken in Prague and in the tourist economy generally, and German is common near the western and southern borders. Czechia: culture works through what the differences between the regions actually consist of, and Czechia: geography the ground they sit on.