Petřín Lookout Tower & the Mirror Maze

Why is it significant?

Tilt your head back. Above you rises an octagonal lattice of steel, sixty-three and a half metres high, narrowing towards a lantern at the top. Yes, it looks like a little sister of the Eiffel Tower. That is exactly what it was meant to be.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Tilt your head back. Above you rises an octagonal lattice of steel, sixty-three and a half metres high, narrowing towards a lantern at the top. Yes, it looks like a little sister of the Eiffel Tower. That is exactly what it was meant to be.

In 1889 members of the Club of Czech Tourists went to the World Exhibition in Paris, climbed Eiffel's brand-new tower, and came home determined to have one of their own. They had it standing in time for the Jubilee Exhibition of 1891, after only a few months of construction. It is roughly a fifth of the Eiffel Tower's height, but it has a trick: it stands on top of a hill. Praguers love to tell you that its lantern sits at about the same height above sea level as the very top of the tower in Paris.

Inside, 299 steps spiral up to the galleries. For decades the tower also worked for a living, carrying television transmitters until the new Žižkov Tower took over in the 1990s. And there is a story, impossible to prove but impossible for Praguers to resist, that Hitler, looking out from the castle in March 1939, wanted the tower torn down because it spoiled his view. It survived him by a very long way.

Two neighbours belong to the same story. The little castle-like pavilion nearby is the Mirror Maze, also built for the 1891 exhibition and moved up here soon afterwards; its facade copies a Gothic gate of Vyšehrad. After the distorting mirrors comes a huge diorama of Prague students and burghers defending Charles Bridge against the Swedes in 1648, in the last weeks of the Thirty Years' War. And the Baroque church of St Lawrence beside it stands, legend says, where pagans once kept a sacred fire, until Prince Boleslaus the Second and Bishop Adalbert built a chapel on the spot at the end of the tenth century.

Now walk round to the old stone wall right behind the tower, the one with the square battlements, and follow it north towards Strahov. It is older than anything else on this hill... and it comes with a story Prague has been telling for more than six hundred years.