Plzen Guide: Plzen - Historical Reserve

Link to the Historical center video clip.

Let's enter the historical centre of Plzen.
It is limited by the greenery of the public gardens where there used to be bulwarks surrounding the town. We can walk through the network of streets which up-to-now preserved its original and extraordinary groundplan of the orthogonal chessboard of a Gothic town.
Your attention will surely be attracted by the Gothic Cathedral of St. Bartholomew with its slender spire (built in modern shape after the fire caused by a thunderbolt in 1835) dominating the square. The second most important building is the Town Hall created in the Renaissance style, decorated with graffiti between 1908-1912. Baroque tower of a cloister church of the Assumption completes the complex of buildings of the Gothic Franciscan cloister.
Even less important historical sights will not escape an architecture-lovers' attention, e. g. group of burghers houses built by generations of our ancestors in the Gothic, Renaissance or Baroque period. The architecture of these styles was used up to recent times by the building activity at the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century.
Thanks to the liberality of the Gothic urbanists there were good preconditions for Plzen to develop freely and so become an example of balanced co-existence between historical and burghers architecture.
The interest to preserve all these architectonic values and characteristics of the town led the Ministry of Culture of Czech Republic to declare Plzen a historical reserve.

This collection is available in both English

and Czech

versions.

Milos Wimmer, May 1998