Charles Bridge

Charles IV laid the founding stone in 1357 (at 5:31 AM on 9 July — 1357-9-7-5:31, a numerical palindrome his astrologers chose; medieval Prague did nothing casually), and his bridge has carried the city across the Vltava ever since: coronation processions, invading armies, floods that took arches and centuries that put them back. Eggs in the mortar, says the legend the masons never denied. For 500 years it was the only crossing, which is why everything in Prague still seems to funnel toward it.

The bridge's second construction, the one everyone photographs, came in the 17th–18th centuries: thirty baroque statues along the parapets, blackened by time into a procession of silhouettes. The star is St John of Nepomuk — the priest thrown from this bridge in 1393, marking the spot of his martyrdom; rubbing the bronze relief's polished dog and falling queen grants a wish and a return to Prague, a ritual so popular the panels glow gold. (The plaque with the actual drowning site, five statues along, gets no queue: tourists wish, historians sigh.)

Both ends carry climbable towers — the ticket that transforms the visit. The Old Town Bridge Tower, Peter Parler's masterpiece gate, frames THE Prague photograph: the bridge's full length aimed at the castle, best 90 minutes before sunset. The Lesser Town pair opposite gives the reverse at dawn. The combined towers ticket is modest money for the two best legal camera positions in the city.

Timing is the entire secret, because the bridge at 2 PM is a crowded souvenir corridor and the bridge at 6 AM is a Gothic dream with gulls: sunrise belongs to photographers and the returning night shift; before 9 AM it's still civilised; after that, surrender to the human river until evening empties it again around 10 PM, when the lamps and the castle floodlights run the night shift. Cross it at least twice — once for the bridge, once from a tower — and once more at dawn if the trip allows a single alarm-clock heroism.