Things to Do in Czechia in May

The Pravčická brána, Europe's largest natural sandstone arch, stands at the heart of Bohemian Switzerland like a cathedral doorway carved by erosion over millions of years. This full-day experience threads together three distinct sandstone landscapes: the arch itself, the Tisa Rocks (a labyrinth of weathered pillars that inspired the alien planet sets of The Chronicles of Narnia), and the Bastei Bridge across the German border, where a nineteenth-century stone walkway clings to pinnacles above the Elbe gorge. The air in May smells of wet moss and pine resin, and the forest floor is soft underfoot, ideal conditions for the steep trail sections that connect these formations.

Bohemian Paradise, Český ráj, is the country's oldest protected landscape, a terrain of sandstone rock towers, forested ridgelines, and medieval ruins positioned on crags that seem designed for dramatic silhouettes. This outing pairs a moderate walk through the rock formations with a visit to one of the region's castles and a stop at a Czech brewery, where the yeasty, bready smell of an active taproom hits the moment you cross the threshold. The hiking is genuine but not punishing: packed-earth trails wind between pillars of stone twice the height of a person, and the canopy overhead filters May sunlight into pale green shafts.

This cross-border day trip covers roughly three hours of driving in exchange for two radically different experiences: Dresden's reconstructed Baroque core, the Frauenkirche dome, the Zwinger palace courtyard, the Brühl Terrace overlooking the Elbe, and the Bastei, a sandstone ridge in Saxon Switzerland where a nineteenth-century bridge leaps between eroded pillars high above the river valley. The contrast is deliberate. Dresden is controlled, ornate, still marked by the visible seams of its postwar reconstruction. The Bastei is raw geology, wind-scoured and vertiginous. Standing on the bridge, you hear nothing but wind channeling through the rock gaps and the faint rush of the Elbe far below.

Charles Bridge at dawn is a different structure than the one tourists photograph at midday. The stone saints lining the balustrade emerge from river fog, the Vltava slides dark and silent below, and the towers of Prague Castle on the hill ahead glow amber in early light. This private walking tour traces the uphill route from the bridge through Malá Strana's narrow streets, where plaster facades in faded ochre and sage green lean over cobblestones worn smooth by centuries, and up the long staircase to the castle complex. A guide who knows the city's layers can point out details that a self-guided walk misses: the Baroque plague columns, the particular doorway where Mozart once entered, the angle from which the cathedral's flying buttresses align into a single sharp silhouette.

Beneath the streets of Brno lies a Cold War-era nuclear shelter built to house city officials in the event of atomic attack. The 10-Z Bunker is not a museum in the conventional sense, it is a preserved environment, kept deliberately close to its operational state: corridors lit by fluorescent tubes that hum and flicker, ventilation machinery that still clicks and whirs, and a pervasive concrete-and-metal smell that belongs to a world organized around institutional survival. The rooms are fitted with period communications equipment, decontamination showers, and sleeping quarters whose narrow bunks and thin mattresses communicate the grimness of the scenario they were designed for. Brno does not market this space with false drama. The facts of the facility speak clearly enough.

Prague's Karlín neighborhood, centered on Křižíkova street, has become the city's most interesting intersection of old infrastructure and new ambition. This tasting takes place in a historical cellar, stone walls sweating cool moisture, barrel-vaulted ceilings that press down just enough to feel intimate, where Moravian wines are poured with the kind of focused attention that Czechia's wine culture deserves but rarely receives from foreign visitors. Moravia produces whites (Grüner Veltliner, Riesling, Pálava) with a minerality and crispness that reflect the limestone-rich soils of the south, and reds (Frankovka, Svatovavřinecké) with a peppery tannic bite that surprises palates expecting only Bohemian beer. The cellar's temperature holds steady regardless of the season, and the tasting format allows enough time to understand what you are drinking rather than simply consuming it.