Náplavka: The Riverbank Farmers' Market

Why is it significant?

Walk along the cobbled lower embankment right by the water, with moored boats on one side and the stone wall of the quay on the other.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk along the cobbled lower embankment right by the water, with moored boats on one side and the stone wall of the quay on the other. If it is Saturday morning, you will hardly be able to move: stalls of cheese, bread, sausages, honey, cider and coffee, and half of Prague with shopping bags and dogs.

The word náplavka means a landing place. For centuries this low bank was where rafts of timber floated down the Vltava from the forests of southern Bohemia were tied up, and where boats unloaded wood, stone and food for the city. The embankment above you was built in the early twentieth century, and the working river slowly fell silent. In the last couple of decades the people of Prague took it back, first with bars on old boats, then with the farmers' market that has become a Saturday ritual.

This is the place to taste what Czechs actually eat at home. Look for soft fresh cheese, smoked sausages, sourdough rye bread with caraway, koláče, round pastries filled with poppy seed, plum jam or sweet curd cheese. And dumplings, of course. Bread dumplings, potato dumplings, and in summer fruit dumplings stuffed with apricots or strawberries, covered in melted butter, sugar and grated curd cheese... served as a main course, to the eternal delight of Czech children.

At Christmas this river comes into the kitchen in another way. In the days before Christmas Eve, sellers set up big tubs of live carp on the streets of Prague, and many families still carry a fish home alive and let it swim in the bathtub until the big day. Fried carp with potato salad is the Czech Christmas dinner, and a scale from the fish in your wallet is said to bring money all year.

So this is where our walk ends, by the water that fed this city for a thousand years: from the first pilsner on Jungmannovo náměstí, through an eight-hundred-year-old market, Hrabal's table, Prague's first coffee, a brewing widow, the little bears and five centuries of dark lager, to a cattle market and, finally, a riverbank where Prague still comes to shop and to talk. Find a bench by the river, buy something you cannot pronounce... and somewhere nearby, as always in Prague, someone will be pouring a beer.