Old Town Hall Underground and Astronomical Clock Guided Tour Prague

Malá Strana and Charles Bridge

The tour starts in Malá Strana, the Lesser Town below the castle, a Baroque quarter of palaces, gardens and quiet squares. After a ten-minute introduction your guide leads you down Mostecká street to the Lesser Town bridge towers and onto Charles Bridge, the stone bridge begun in 1357 under Charles IV and completed in the early 15th century. It is 516 metres long, rests on sixteen arches and carries thirty statues of saints added mostly in the Baroque period. The guide spends about twenty minutes on the bridge with the legends: the eggs said to be mixed into the mortar, the brass plaque that people touch for luck, and the floods the bridge has survived.

The morning departure crosses the bridge before the heaviest crowds; the 17:00 departure gets the evening light on the river and the castle. On the Old Town side you pass through the Old Town bridge tower, one of the finest Gothic gateways in Europe, and into the lanes.

The lanes of the Old Town

The Old Town of Prague has been protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1992, and the hour-long walk through it follows the Royal Route, the path of coronation processions from the bridge to the square. You pass Karlova street with its painted house signs, the walls of the Clementinum, the former Jesuit college with its library and observatory tower, small squares that were medieval markets, and the hidden passages that cut between courtyards. The guide explains how the ground level of the Old Town was raised in the 13th century to protect it from floods, which is why so many houses have Romanesque cellars that were once ground floors.

The walk ends on Old Town Square in front of the Church of Our Lady before Týn, the Old Town Hall and the Astronomical Clock, with the guide pointing out the 27 crosses in the paving that mark the execution of 1621. This is the best introduction to the Old Town for a first visit.

The Jewish Quarter, Josefov

About thirty minutes of the walk are spent in Josefov, the former Jewish Town north of Old Town Square. From outside you see the Old-New Synagogue, finished around 1270 and still in use, the Jewish Town Hall with its clock whose Hebrew numerals run anticlockwise, the Maisel and Spanish synagogues, and the high wall of the Old Jewish Cemetery with its layers of tombstones. The guide tells the story of the ghetto, the legend of the Golem and the rebuilding of the quarter around 1900 that gave it the Art Nouveau facades of Pařížská street.

Entry to the synagogues is not part of the tour; they open to visitors as the Jewish Museum, and the guide will tell you the opening hours if you want to return. On the walk-only option, parts of the Jewish Quarter are also seen from outside before the tour ends.

The Old Town Hall underground

The Old Town Hall was founded in 1338 as the seat of the self-governing Old Town, and under its halls lies a labyrinth that most visitors never see. The underground is a network of Romanesque and early Gothic rooms from the 12th and 13th centuries, the original ground floors of houses that stood here before the street level was raised against floods. For about an hour an official Old Town Hall guide leads you through the vaulted cellars that later served as storage, dungeons and a shelter, explaining daily life in medieval Prague, its courts and its prisons.

The visit includes the historic interiors above ground: the council chamber, the Gothic Chapel of the Virgin Mary with its oriel window, the assembly halls with their painted ceilings and the room behind the Astronomical Clock where you see the wooden Apostles that step out above the dial every hour. The entry tickets are included in the default option.

The Astronomical Clock and the tower

The Astronomical Clock, the Orloj, was installed on the southern wall of the Old Town Hall in 1410 and is the oldest astronomical clock in the world still working. Its upper dial shows the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac, Babylonian hours and the old Bohemian time, and the lower calendar plate shows the months and the saints' days. On the hour, from 9:00 to 23:00, the Apostles pass in the windows while the figure of Death rings a bell. Your guides explain the mechanism and the legend of the clockmaker, so you understand what you watch from the square.

The last part of the tour is the Old Town Hall tower, almost 70 metres high, with a lift for most of the climb and a gallery that circles the top. From here you see the whole of Old Town Square, the Týn towers, the castle and the red roofs of the city, the finest view in the Old Town. The tour ends back on the square.