Prague Hotels

Take the time to find the tiny and very well-hidden Alchemist cafe behind the Sparta football stadium on Jana Zajíce ulice. With fantastic coffee and great ice cream and cakes, this quiet, smoke-free cafe is an excellent way to start your day.

From there make the short walk to the edge of Stromovka and begin your descent into the splendid old royal hunting grounds that now comprise Prague’s largest city park.

Seriously flooded last summer, with a loss of over 600 trees, the park has largely retained its magnificence. If you have roller blades or bikes, this is also a great way to spend a late summer or autumn day. (Personally, I think that autumn is the best time of year to visit Stromovka – it feels somehow older and more mysterious.)

On bikes or skates, the trip to the zoo will take about a half hour - on foot give yourselves about an hour. A good map of the city or, better yet, of the park itself isn’t a bad idea as the signs leading to the zoo are few and far between, though getting lost in Stromovka can be part of the fun.

Like Stromovka, the Zoo was seriously damaged during the floods, but a dramatic evacuation and well-planned reconstruction have restored it, and many feel that the disaster has provided a catalyst for vastly modernising and improving the 72-year-old gardens.

One year on from the floods, life had largely returned to normal, at least for the zoo's animals. Some of the effects of the devastation are still visible in the zoo's lower half: the gorilla house and the big cats' enclosure, for instance, were completely destroyed. But there is an essential difference: There’s now a positive air of renewal, and reconstruction is well underway.