Letenské Sady

The rebellious punk younger sister to Petrin Park, Letna Park is located to the north of Prague’s city center right by the banks of the Vltava River. Its steep slopes offer unobstructed views of the city, with stone steps leading up to the top, where bizarrely enough, a gigantic metronome awaits you. After the Communist takeover in 1955, a huge monument to Stalin was unveiled here. It was derisively nicknamed ‘the queue for meat’, as it features a line of workers behind a statue of Stalin. But after de-Stalinization, the statue became a major embarrassment, and was demolished less than a decade later.

In the 1990s, a pirate radio station operated out of a bomb shelter at the former statue’s base, and in 1991 the Prague Metronome was built. Naturally, this odd history lends itself to a kind of punk atmosphere, and surely enough, Letna Park has become a center of youthful rebelliousness, a favourite with teenage couples and skateboarders free-styling out in the square behind the metronome. This all makes Letna Park a definite must-see for any young couples interested in the counter-culture scene in Czech, a modern rendition of the old Bohemian artsy-ness that made Prague so famous back in the early 1900s.