Stromovka: The King's Hunting Ground and the Emperor's Tunnel

Why is it significant?

Walk in under the old trees and let the avenue lead you towards the water. Meadows, ponds, oaks and plane trees, joggers and pushchairs: Stromovka looks like any great city park. But it began as a royal hunting ground more than seven and a half centuries ago.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk in under the old trees and let the avenue lead you towards the water. Meadows, ponds, oaks and plane trees, joggers and pushchairs: Stromovka looks like any great city park. But it began as a royal hunting ground more than seven and a half centuries ago.

Tradition says that King Přemysl Otakar II founded a game reserve here in 1268, with deer and boar for royal hunts and walls to keep everyone else out. The nickname Stromovka simply means the place of trees, but its official name is still Královská obora, the Royal Game Reserve. For centuries ordinary Praguers could only peer through the gates.

Its golden age came with Emperor Rudolf II, the eccentric Habsburg who made Prague a capital of alchemists and astronomers around 1600. He wanted ponds, and his engineers delivered something extraordinary: a tunnel more than a kilometre long, cut through the rock beneath Letná, to bring water from the Vltava into the park. It was dug by hand between 1584 and 1593, and it still runs, hidden, beneath the plateau you crossed earlier on this walk.

In 1804 the reserve was finally opened to the public, and the people of Prague claimed it as their own. The river has not always been kind to it. In August 2002 the great flood poured over Holešovice, and the whole park lay under water, the ponds and the river becoming one silver sheet. It recovered, as it always has. At its western end, look out for a small castle-like summer palace with battlements, once used by the governors of Bohemia, standing on its rise like a toy fortress above the meadows.

So here the walk ends, far from the crowds: a sculptor's mystic house, a condemned man's villa, Stalin's empty plinth, the field of the keys, a pavilion that beat the world, and a king's forest. Find a bench by the water, listen to the trees, and remember that Prague's best secrets are usually just over the hill.