Coverage / Czechia
Czechia
Eastern Europe
Where Czechia earns a visit: 10 activities across 13 curated destinations.
10 activities · 13 pairings · 18 verified providers
What you can do in Czechia
Music & Culture Festivals
- Colours of OstravaOstravaJulColours of Ostrava is the Czech Republic's biggest multi-genre music festival, held every July inside Dolni Vitkovice, a decommissioned ironworks, coal mine and steel complex in the industrial city of Ostrava. Since 2012 the festival has used the raw setting of blast furnaces, gas holders and towers as its backdrop, with stages built among the machinery and a converted gas holder serving as an indoor hall. The line-up spans rock, pop, world and electronic music with headline international acts, alongside Meltingpot, a forum of talks and debates. Over four days it draws around fifty thousand people a day. For a festival that turns heavy industry into a stage, in a corner of Moravia most visitors never reach, Ostrava in July is the reason to go.
- Prague Spring International Music FestivalPragueMay JunThe Prague Spring International Music Festival is the Czech Republic's flagship classical event, founded in 1946 by the conductor Rafael Kubelik. For about three weeks from mid-May it fills the city's great halls, the neo-Renaissance Rudolfinum and the Art Nouveau Municipal House among them, with leading orchestras, conductors and soloists from around the world. By tradition the festival opens on 12 May, the anniversary of Bedrich Smetana's death, with his cycle Ma vlast, and closes with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Around it run the Prague Spring International Music Competition and an art salon. For anyone who wants to hear world-class orchestral and chamber music in the city that shaped Smetana, Dvorak and Janacek, this is the season to come.
Wine / Spirits Education
- Plzenyear-roundPlzen is where lager as the world knows it was invented. On 5 October 1842 the burghers' brewery here poured the first batch of Pilsner Urquell, a clear golden beer that a Bavarian brewer, Josef Groll, made by combining local soft water, Saaz hops, pale malt and cold cave lagering. The style spread worldwide, and most pale lagers today are its descendants. A visit to the brewery is beer education at the source: you walk the historic and modern brewhouses, see the bottling line, and descend into the sandstone lager cellars to taste unfiltered, unpasteurised Pilsner Urquell drawn straight from oak barrels, the way it was conditioned before modern tanks. Pair it with the town's Brewery Museum and the Pilsen Historical Underground to understand why this one Bohemian city reshaped what much of the planet drinks.
- ValticeApr May Jun Jul Aug Sep OctSouth Moravia is the heart of Czech wine, and Valtice is its schoolroom. The town sits in the Lednice-Valtice cultural landscape, a UNESCO site of chateaux, avenues and vineyards on the Austrian border, where limestone slopes below the Palava hills grow the aromatic whites the region is known for, Veltlinske zelene, Ryzlink and the local Palava among them. The Baroque Valtice Chateau holds the National Wine Salon, a permanent tasting exposition of the hundred best Czech wines picked each year by national competition, so you can taste the country's benchmark bottles side by side in one cellar. Add a tasting in the chateau's own historic cellars and a cycle out through the vineyards, and Valtice becomes the clearest single place to learn Czech and Moravian wine.
Witness / Attend
- Five-Petalled Rose FestivalCesky KrumlovJunThe Five-Petalled Rose Festival turns Cesky Krumlov back into a Renaissance town for one weekend each June. The whole UNESCO-listed old town, wrapped in a bend of the Vltava below its huge castle, is given over to the era of the Rozmberk lords, whose five-petalled rose is the town emblem, and specifically to the year 1586. Thousands of costumed locals fill the streets for a grand historical parade with knights on horseback, period markets, fencing and jousting, early music, jugglers and fire shows, with torchlit processions and fireworks at night. It is among the largest historical festivals in the country, drawing around eighteen thousand visitors to a town of fewer than fourteen thousand. For living history in one of Europe's best-preserved medieval townscapes, this is the weekend to come.
- Masopust - Shrovetide Processions of the Hlinecko RegionHlinskoJan FebMasopust, the Czech pre-Lenten carnival, survives in its oldest door-to-door form in the villages of the Hlinecko region around Hlinsko, where UNESCO listed the Shrovetide processions as intangible cultural heritage in 2010. On set days in late winter, the men and boys of each village put on two kinds of hand-made mask, red for the unmarried and dark for the married, and move house to house behind a brass band. At each home four masked figures perform a short ritual dance, with the householder's permission, to bring a good harvest and prosperity, and receive food, drink and a small fee in return. After the last house comes the symbolic killing of the mare, a mock trial and testament read out in the street. Nothing is staged for outsiders: these are the community's own rounds, unbroken for generations, and to stand in a cold Bohemian village while the masks come down the lane is to watch an old rural Europe carry on.
Best months at a glance
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Upcoming events in Czechia
- Masopust - Shrovetide Processions of the Hlinecko RegionJan 30, 2027 – Feb 13, 2027expected
- Prague Spring International Music FestivalMay 12, 2027 – Jun 4, 2027expected
- Five-Petalled Rose FestivalJun 18–20, 2027expected
- Karlovy Vary International Film FestivalJul 2–10, 2027expected
- Colours of OstravaJul 14–17, 2027expected