Charles Bridge

Charles Bridge is crossed on foot at almost any hour, and the experience is entirely different at 6am — mist on the river, no crowds, the baroque statues emerging from darkness as lamplight catches their gilded crowns — from what it is at noon when the bridge becomes a living gallery of portrait painters, souvenir sellers and guided groups filling the 515 metres from tower to tower.

The statues lining the parapets are almost entirely baroque additions from the 17th and 18th centuries, clustered against the bridge's original Renaissance lamp posts, and they represent a saints' gallery that a medieval city would have placed inside a church: the shock is that here they stand outdoors, above a working city river, their stone robes and gestures weathered by three centuries of Vltava floods.

At the bridge's Prague end the Old Town Bridge Tower functions as a monumental gateway, its Gothic vaults inside displaying the armorial shields of King Charles IV and the Bohemian crown, while across the water the Lesser Town Bridge Tower and its affiliated Gothic gate mark the former crossing point into the Lesser Quarter — two separate cities once separated by the river and connected only here.

Charles Bridge was built under Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia, who made Prague the capital of the empire and who chose a monumental stone crossing over the river rather than the simpler timber bridges that preceded it, a statement of permanence and ambition that the baroque statues later filled with religious meaning.

The bridge's engineering has held for more than six centuries: 30 pillars of Bohemian sandstone, faced with older stone from nearby quarries and shaped into 16 arches that distribute the river's force without drama, the whole structure reading as pure geometry from the river banks — a fact best appreciated at sunset, when the arches multiply in the water below.

The bridge's 30 baroque statues were gradually added from the 17th century onwards, commissioned by various religious orders as acts of counter-reformation devotion, and each represents a saint with a specific connection to Bohemia: St. John of Nepomuk, whose statue is the most frequently touched — locals believe touching it brings good luck — stands at the position on the bridge from which, according to tradition, he was thrown into the river for refusing to reveal the queen's confessional secrets.

From the middle of the bridge on a clear morning, the view upriver towards the castle district frames the castle, St. Vitus Cathedral and the Petřín hillside as a single composition, and from this position the bridge functions as a viewing platform for the city's own architecture in the way that few urban bridges in Europe do.

The concentration of baroque sculpture above a working urban river, in a single pedestrian span, is unique to Prague.

Charles IV commissioned the bridge in 1357 and it has survived six centuries of floods without major rebuilding.

The view from the bridge — St. Vitus Cathedral above, the river, the hills beyond — is the canonical Prague prospect.