Prague's Secret Lesser Town: Kampa, the Devil's Stream & the Embassy Garden of 1989

Baroque terraces, a wax child with a royal wardrobe, the Knights of Malta and the Lennon Wall, peacocks behind a wall, giant crawling babies and a river island where a nation learned to march

Prague · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Lobkowicz Palace: the Embassy Garden of 1989

Vlašská 19, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Stand in quiet, sloping Vlašská street, in front of a dignified Baroque palace with a German flag above the door. It looks like the most peaceful address in Prague. In the late summer of 1989, this pavement was full of abandoned Trabants and Wartburgs, little East German cars left behind by owners who had no intention of ever coming back for them.

The Lobkowicz Palace was built in the early 1700s, and since the 1970s it has housed the embassy of West Germany, today simply Germany. In 1989 East Germans could still travel to communist Czechoslovakia without a visa, and word spread that this embassy would not turn them away. So they came, first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands, climbing over the back fence of the garden from the slope of Petřín, handing their children over the bars. By the end of September several thousand people were camping in the mud of a Baroque garden, in tents, under the trees, in the rain.

On the evening of the thirtieth of September 1989, the West German foreign minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher stepped out on to the palace balcony. He had been born near Halle, in what became East Germany, and he had come to tell these people that they could leave. He never finished his sentence. The moment he said the word for departure, the garden exploded into a roar so loud that the rest was lost... it is one of the most famous unfinished sentences in German history.

Trains took them to the West, routed through East German territory because the regime in East Berlin insisted on expelling them itself. Six weeks later the Berlin Wall fell, and a week after that, Prague began its own Velvet Revolution. In the garden today stands a bronze cast of David Černý's Quo Vadis, a Trabant walking away on four human legs, and you can glimpse it from the path on Petřín behind the embassy.

It is hard to find a better place to begin a walk about hidden Malá Strana, because almost nothing about this story shows from the street. Now walk down Vlašská, the old street of Italian builders, past the steep lane of Tržiště, towards Karmelitská. Just before the tram tracks, a gateway hides one of the loveliest gardens in Prague.
2. Vrtba Garden

Karmelitská 25, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Climb the staircases of the Vrtba Garden terrace by terrace, past stone balustrades and statues of gods, until the roofs of Malá Strana spread out beneath you. From the top, the dome of St Nicholas seems close enough to touch, and the castle floats along the ridge above it. And yet from the street below you would never guess any of this is here.

The garden was created around 1720 for Count Jan Josef of Vrtba, a senior official of the Bohemian kingdom, who owned the palace on Karmelitská. His architect, František Maxmilián Kaňka, had a problem: a narrow, steep strip of hillside behind the house. His answer was theatre. Instead of fighting the slope, he stacked it, terrace upon terrace, joined by staircases, so that each level reveals the next as you climb.

Look at the sculptures. Many of them came from the workshop of Matthias Bernard Braun, the great sculptor of Czech Baroque, who could make stone look as if it were caught in the wind. Down at the bottom, the sala terrena, the cool garden hall, carries paintings by Václav Vavřinec Reiner. Three of the best artists of their generation worked on a garden you could cross in a couple of minutes.

By the late twentieth century it had decayed badly, its statues crumbling, its terraces overgrown. A long restoration in the 1990s brought it back, and today it is part of the protected historic centre of Prague, on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Still, it stays strangely quiet. Many people walk past the gate on Karmelitská every day without ever noticing it.

Gardens like this one were the private luxury of Prague's nobility, built for walking, flirting, music and showing off to visitors. Linger for a moment on the top terrace... then come back down to Karmelitská and walk a few steps along the tram tracks. The next church looks modest from outside, but pilgrims cross oceans to see what it keeps behind the altar.
3. Our Lady Victorious & the Infant Jesus of Prague

Karmelitská 9, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Step inside the church on Karmelitská and let your eyes adjust to the gold. Then look for the glass case on a side altar. Inside stands a tiny figure, less than half a metre tall, a child with a crown, one hand raised in blessing, wearing a robe stiff with embroidery. People kneel in front of it in a dozen languages.

The building began as a Protestant church. German Lutherans built it in the 1610s and dedicated it to the Holy Trinity. Then came the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the Protestant defeat, and the church was handed to the Catholic Carmelites, who renamed it Our Lady Victorious, after the victory that had ruined its builders. History has a sense of irony here.

The little figure is made of carved wood covered in wax, and it came from Spain. In 1628 a noblewoman, Polyxena of Lobkowicz, gave it to the Carmelites. During the Thirty Years' War the church was looted, and the statue was thrown behind the altar with its hands broken off. Legend says that years later a priest found it and heard a voice: give me back my hands, and I will give you peace.

Since then, the Infant Jesus of Prague has become one of the most famous religious images in the world, with copies in churches from the Philippines to Mexico and Brazil. It owns a wardrobe of around a hundred robes sent as gifts from all over the world, and the Carmelite sisters change them according to the colours of the church year. Tradition says one of them was embroidered by Empress Maria Theresa herself. In 2009 Pope Benedict the Sixteenth came to visit and brought it a crown.

Whatever you believe, it is extraordinary that a doll-sized figure in a side street of Malá Strana draws pilgrims from across the globe. Now continue a short way south along Karmelitská. Next comes another church, but one that stopped being a church long ago... and now it is full of music.
4. Museum of Czech Music

Karmelitská 2/4, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Walk into the great hall of the Museum of Czech Music and look up. The vaults above you are clearly the vaults of a church, tall and white, with galleries running around them. But instead of an altar there are pianos, harps, violins and strange old wind instruments, and sometimes, instead of a sermon, a concert.

This was the Baroque church of St Mary Magdalene, belonging to a Dominican monastery, completed at the beginning of the 1700s. Its life as a church was short. In the 1780s the reforming Emperor Joseph the Second closed it, along with hundreds of other religious houses, and for two centuries the building served decidedly unholy purposes, among other things as a post office and an archive. Since 2004 it has belonged to the National Museum, as the home of its music collection.

Czechs like to say co Čech, to muzikant, every Czech a musician, and in the eighteenth century it was almost true. Village schoolmasters taught music, Bohemian players and composers filled the orchestras of Vienna, Paris and Mannheim, and travellers called Bohemia the conservatory of Europe. This museum holds the evidence: instruments made in Prague workshops, and the ones Czech musicians carried around the world.

And Prague returned the favour to the greatest visitor of all. When Mozart's Marriage of Figaro was a sensation here, the city invited him to write a new opera, and on the twenty-ninth of October 1787 Don Giovanni had its world premiere in Prague, at the Estates Theatre across the river. Mozart is said to have remarked that the Praguers understood him. And the Prague Spring festival, founded in 1946, traditionally opens on the twelfth of May, the anniversary of Bedřich Smetana's death, with his cycle My Country.

Now come out and walk into the square next door, Maltézské náměstí, named after the knights who have held this corner of Prague for over eight centuries. Keep left past the palaces and follow the lane into the next square, where an old garden wall has been shouting in paint for more than forty years.
5. Grand Priory Square & the Lennon Wall

Velkopřevorské náměstí, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Stand in front of the wall and let it hit you: layer upon layer of colour, faces of John Lennon, peace signs, hearts, names, slogans in twenty languages, painted over each other so many times that the paint itself must be centimetres thick. Behind it, ironically, lies the quiet garden of one of the oldest religious orders in the world.

This square belongs to the Knights of Malta, the Order of St John. They came to Prague in the twelfth century, under King Vladislav the Second, and were given the task of guarding the approach to the stone Judith Bridge, the predecessor of Charles Bridge. Their church, Our Lady beneath the Chain, stands just around the corner with its two massive Gothic towers, and the Baroque palace on this square is still the seat of their Grand Prior.

The wall became famous in December 1980. When John Lennon was murdered in New York, young Praguers painted his portrait here, along with Beatles lyrics. Under the communist regime, Lennon stood for peace, freedom and everything Western rock music promised. The police painted over the wall again and again, and every time the portraits and the slogans came back, sometimes overnight. In the late 1980s young people gathered here to sing, and the gatherings turned into clashes with the police.

Look closely at the faces of the people adding their own lines today: a couple writing their initials, a student copying a lyric, an old man reading the layers like a newspaper. The wall is never finished. That is its whole meaning. And one more detail most visitors miss: listen for the water. Behind the little bridge at the end of the wall turns an old mill wheel, on a stream with a very strange name.

Before Kampa, though, a short detour north to a garden that almost nobody finds. Walk through Lázeňská street to Mostecká, and just before the towers of Charles Bridge turn left into U Lužického semináře. Look for a plain gate in a long wall... and listen for a peacock.
6. Vojan Gardens

U Lužického semináře, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Go through the gate in the long wall and close it behind you. The noise of Charles Bridge, just a couple of hundred metres away, simply switches off. Instead: lawns, old fruit trees, benches in the shade, and, very likely, a peacock dragging its tail across the grass as if it owned the place. It does, more or less.

The Vojan Gardens are often called the oldest garden in Prague. In the Middle Ages this land belonged to the court of the bishops of Prague, at the end of the old Judith Bridge. Later it became the garden of a convent of Carmelite nuns, and it kept their enclosed, private feeling: high walls, an orchard, paths made for walking and thinking rather than for being seen.

Find the little chapel of St Elijah. It is Baroque, but it pretends to be a cave: its walls are encrusted with artificial stalactites and rough stone, a reminder that the prophet Elijah, the spiritual father of the Carmelites, lived as a hermit on Mount Carmel. Not far away stands a second chapel, dedicated to St Theresa, the great Carmelite reformer. Two saints, two moods, in one quiet orchard.

The garden is named after Eduard Vojan, the greatest Czech actor of his time, famous at the National Theatre for his Hamlet and his tragic kings. He died in 1920, and naming this garden after him was the city's way of giving him a corner of peace. It suits him. On a weekday morning you might share the whole garden with a few office workers eating lunch, a mother with a pram, and the peacocks.

Stay as long as you like... this is the place in Malá Strana to do nothing at all. Then walk back along U Lužického semináře to the bridge towers, step up on to Charles Bridge, and after a few paces take the staircase on your right, down on to the island below. Welcome to Kampa.
7. Na Kampě & the Devil's Stream

Na Kampě, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Come down the steps from Charles Bridge and stop at the bottom. In front of you opens Na Kampě, a long, irregular square of pastel houses, old trees and cobbles, with the bridge's great stone arches striding over the rooftops behind you. The crowd on the bridge is a few metres above your head... and down here, half of them never notice this place exists.

Kampa is an island, though it hardly feels like one. On one side is the Vltava. On the other runs a narrow channel, the Čertovka, the Devil's Stream, dug in the Middle Ages as a millrace to drive the mills of Malá Strana. Walk to the edge of the square and look over: houses rise straight out of the water, with tiny balconies and wooden doors at water level, which is why guidebooks love to call this Prague's little Venice.

And why the Devil? Prague's favourite explanation has nothing to do with Satan. Legend says that in a house nearby lived a woman with such a ferocious temper that the neighbours called her the she-devil... and the stream was named after her. There are other theories, but none of them is as satisfying.

The island has paid for its beauty. It sits low, right in the river, and in August 2002 the great Vltava flood put Kampa under water, filling cellars and ground floors and forcing everyone out. Look for the marks on the walls showing how high the water rose in different floods over the centuries. Kampa has been rebuilt, dried out and repainted many times, and it always comes back.

One more neighbour deserves a mention. In a villa just south of this square lived the actor and writer Jan Werich, one of the best-loved Czech comedians of the twentieth century, for decades until his death in 1980. Walk south now along the square and into the park, towards an old mill building on the riverbank... and watch out for some very large babies.
8. Museum Kampa & David Černý's Babies

U Sovových mlýnů 2, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Walk across the lawn towards the old mill on the riverbank and you will meet them: three enormous bronze babies, crawling across the grass on hands and knees. Children climb on their backs. Tourists pose beside them. And then people look at their faces and fall silent, because where a face should be, each baby has a flat, vertical slot, like a barcode or a coin slot.

They are the work of David Černý, Prague's most provocative sculptor, the man behind the walking Trabant at the start of this walk. The originals were made to crawl up the Žižkov television tower in 2000, a deliberately absurd answer to a building many Praguers hated. These three came down to earth, and here they ask their own uncomfortable question: are these babies, or products?

Behind them stands Museum Kampa, in the old Sova's Mills, a mill complex that worked on this spot for centuries. It opened in 2003 and holds the collection of Jan and Meda Mládek, Czech émigrés who spent decades abroad buying the work of Central European artists the communist regime ignored or banned. Its treasures include paintings by František Kupka, one of the pioneers of abstract art, and the sculptures of the Czech cubist Otto Gutfreund.

Meda Mládková lived to be over a hundred. While the borders were closed, she helped artists behind the Iron Curtain by buying their work, and after 1989 she brought the whole collection home and gave it to her country. The flood of 2002 struck the mill just before the museum was due to open, and it opened anyway, a year later. That stubbornness feels very Kampa.

Before you leave, walk to the riverside terrace for one of the best views of Charles Bridge, almost from water level. Then leave the island westwards, over the little bridge across the Čertovka, into Všehrdova street. At the end of it stands a palace that was built on war profits... and later belonged to a movement of gymnasts.
9. Michna Palace (Tyrš House)

Újezd 450/40, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Stand in front of the long Baroque palace at the corner of Újezd and look at its stately front, its courtyard and the garden reaching towards Kampa. A nobleman's dream house, you would think. Then you notice the word Sokol, falcon, and the name Tyršův dům, Tyrš House, and the story turns in a completely unexpected direction.

The palace was rebuilt in the seventeenth century for Pavel Michna of Vacínov, one of the great winners of the Thirty Years' War. After the Protestant defeat at White Mountain in 1620, the estates of the losers were confiscated, and men like Michna grew enormously rich, partly through a notorious consortium that debased the kingdom's silver coinage. He wanted a palace to match his new rank, and the Italian architect Francesco Caratti gave him one.

Fortunes made that fast rarely last. The family did not hold on to its glory, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the palace ended up serving the army as an arsenal and storehouse, slowly falling apart.

Then, in the early 1920s, it was bought by Sokol, the Czech gymnastics movement, founded in 1862 by Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner. Sokol was never only about sport. Under the Habsburgs it trained a nation in discipline and self-confidence; its members, in their red shirts, marched in huge displays of synchronised exercise, the slets. The palace was restored and named after Tyrš, and it is still the headquarters of the movement today.

Every regime that feared free citizens feared Sokol. The Nazis banned it and sent many of its leaders to concentration camps. The communists took it over and then shut it down. It came back to life after 1989, in this very building. Now walk south along Říční street, the River Street, a quiet lane parallel to Újezd. Halfway along, a tiny white church hides a name that makes everyone smile.
10. St John at the Laundry

Říční, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Look for the small white church on Říční street, with a squat tower and a steep roof, so modest it could almost be a village chapel. That is exactly what it once was. Its name is kostel svatého Jana Křtitele Na Prádle, the church of St John the Baptist... at the Laundry.

Long before Malá Strana grew around it, this was the parish church of a small riverside settlement called Újezd, on the road along the Vltava. Its oldest walls are Romanesque, from the twelfth century, and inside, fragments of medieval wall paintings have survived centuries of whitewash. For hundreds of years the local fishermen, raftsmen and gardeners came here to be baptised, married and buried.

Then came Emperor Joseph the Second and his reforms in the 1780s, which closed this church, like so many others. It was sold, divided and turned to everyday uses, and for a time it served as a laundry, with washerwomen working where the altar had stood. The church was eventually returned to worship in the twentieth century... but the laundry never left its name.

Compare it with the palaces you have passed today. No famous architect signed it, no emperor paid for it, and yet it is older than all of them, older than Charles Bridge, older than the Lesser Town itself. It has outlived the Dominican monastery up the street, the Michna fortune and several empires, and the river has come calling more than once, as the name of this street, River Street, suggests.

There is something very Prague about a place keeping the nickname from its most humble chapter rather than its most glorious one. Now walk on to the end of Říční, turn left on to Vítězná, and head towards the river. Ahead of you, a broad granite bridge with ornate lamps leaps across the water... and its name has changed with every regime.
11. Most Legií: the Bridge of the Legions

most Legií, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Walk out on to Most Legií and stop by the balustrade. Upstream, Charles Bridge lies across the river like a dark stone ribbon, with the castle and St Vitus above it. Behind you, at the far end of this bridge, the golden roof of the National Theatre catches the light. Trams rattle past, the river is wide and fast here, and this may well be the finest view in Prague that costs nothing at all.

The bridge was finished in 1901, replacing an older chain bridge on the same spot, and it was built to be admired: broad granite arches, ornate lamps and sculpted decoration. At first it was named after Emperor Franz the First. In 1919, a year after independence, it was renamed the Bridge of the Legions.

The legionnaires were Czech and Slovak soldiers who fought on the side of the Allies in the First World War, many of them former prisoners and deserters from the Austro-Hungarian army. In Russia, tens of thousands of them ended up controlling a large part of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1918, and the long journey home took some of them right around the world. Their fight helped convince the Allies that Czechoslovakia deserved to exist.

And then the name kept changing with the regime. The communists, who distrusted the memory of soldiers who had fought the Bolsheviks, renamed it in 1960 the Bridge of the First of May. In 1990, a few months after the Velvet Revolution, the legionnaires got their bridge back. In Prague, you can read the history of the century simply by reading the street signs.

Look down from the balustrade at the long green island beneath the bridge. A staircase leads down to it from the middle of the bridge. Take it, and walk north along the island to its tip. That is where this walk ends, on a shore where a whole nation once learned to march in step.
12. Střelecký ostrov: Shooters' Island

Střelecký ostrov, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

Walk to the northern tip of the island and sit down by the water. In front of you the Vltava splits around Kampa, Charles Bridge stretches across the river, and the towers of the Old Town rise on the right bank. Swans drift past, students sprawl on the grass, and the city seems to go quiet just for you.

This is Střelecký ostrov, Shooters' Island. For centuries the marksmen of Prague came here to practise with crossbows and later with firearms, safely out in the river, where a stray shot would only splash. Their guild held festivals and competitions on the island, and the name has stuck long after the last target came down.

In the nineteenth century the island became Prague's open-air living room: dances, concerts, beer gardens and political meetings. In 1882 it hosted the very first Sokol slet, the mass gathering of the gymnastics movement whose headquarters you saw on Újezd. And on the first of May 1890, tens of thousands of workers gathered here for one of the first May Day rallies in Bohemia. Gymnasts and workers, nationalists and socialists... this little island heard them all.

Think back over the whole walk. A garden where refugees waited in the mud for a sentence that set them free. A wax child with a royal wardrobe. Knights guarding a bridge that no longer exists, and a wall that will never be finished. Peacocks behind a convent wall, a stream named after a bad-tempered woman, babies with barcodes for faces, a church named after a laundry. None of it is on the main road. All of it is Malá Strana.

Stay here for the sunset if you can, when the bridges turn gold and the castle windows catch the last of the light. Then climb back up the staircase to Most Legií: the National Theatre and the trams of the Old Town are just across the bridge... and the hidden Prague is only ever one side street away.