With this post, I will take you to visit Karlštejn Castle, located about 30 km south-west of Prague. It is a fairy-tale castle, which enchants visitors for its beauty and for the views that can be seen once you get here.
Getting to the castle is very simple: from Prague station, there is a train every hour (9:19, 10:19, 11:19 am are the times they gave me for the morning) that arrives in Karlštejn in 40 minutes. From the village station, you can take a collective taxi (100 crowns per person) or a carriage that goes to the castle (the third alternative is to get there on foot in half an hour).
At the ticket office, you can choose the time and language of the guided tour (of course I decided the visit in English). The ticket costs 270 crowns, and the trip lasted about an hour. If you want to take pictures or videos inside the castle, you have to pay a separate ticket (150 crowns to take pictures; 200 crowns). Honestly? I preferred not to buy either of the two extra tickets.
The castle was built at the behest of Emperor Charles IV and has been expanded several times (and this can be seen from the fact that the buildings are ideally “divisible into three sections”). Located at the top of the hill and surrounded by forests, it was built to guard the royal treasures and jewels of the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and was also a retreat for the king. The gems that now you can see, unfortunately, are no longer the original ones, but only copies. I was enchanted, during the visit, by how much this castle has to tell, how many small details it hides and how much of its past manages to show again perfectly. We all smiled for the bathrooms built outside the walls and that dumped directly on the gardens below (I do not know why but this made me smile thinking it was not to be inviting to walk around the gardens when these bathrooms were in function). Another thing that made us smile was a little door that, “facing” on the stairs, connected the king’s room with that of the queen. The thing that amused us was the explanation that gave us the guide about the door: the key of that door had the king, but not the queen, and this because it was thought that the queen could influence it in a negative way taken by some strange raptus!
Sure, it’s a “silly tale”, but it still has us. In addition to these things, including bathrooms and small doors, many other little details have made the visit very interesting to discover and review the history of the city of Prague. In a room with many paintings (portraits of personalities from the history of the town and the country), we also found the portrait of Libuše, the legendary founder of the Přemyslide dynasty, founder of the city of Prague (in the year 730) and princess of the Czech people.
After the visit of the internal rooms, we were able to turn freely for the external spaces of the castle, including towers and walkways along the walls, to discover the hidden little corners, of the architecture and the nature that surrounds the castle. We ended our visit, which was now lunchtime, so we decided to go in search of where to eat before taking the train back to Prague. So we went to discover the small village of Karlštejn: little, very small, it seems to rotate all around the castle and tourists who come up here to visit it. There are many small shops for tourists and many restaurants – “pubs” for those who want to stop and eat something. Many restaurants close during winter time, I guess for the lack of tourists compared to the warm season (although those I saw were not so few), but the choice is still quite varied. We have opted for a place located right in front of the village station. The waiter who served us didn’t speak a word of English (unfortunately), but we understood each other quite decently.