Plzen Guide: Charms of the Town's Surroundings

Link to the Plzen Surroundings video clip.

The West Bohemia metropolis is set in a picturesque countryside with river beds. Dark strips of woods and sunny valleys conceal attractive places for tourists.
One of them stands out. It is the outline of a castle ruin which dominates the scenic panorama. Czech King Charles IV had built the Gothic castle Radyne on a hill opposite the former Plzen castle in 1356-1361. Nowadays only a stone masonry remains and a prismatic tower rises on the horizon, giving us a lovely view of faraway borders with Bavaria.
The melancholic atmosphere of by-gone times is changed by a harmonic and cultivated hunting chateau Kozel (The Buck). A well kept English park is a pleasant place for a walk in any time of the year, but only during the tourist season can the chateau's interiors be visited, accompanied by a commentary on this former summer seat of the count Cernin's family.
By foot, there are accessible areas along the romantic valley of the River Berounka or a wooded hill Krkavec. A walk around the shiny surfaces of Bolevec Ponds will guide you to the national reserve with a spring, beginning in a peat-bog behind the Stone Pond.
Other destinations, though far, are worth seeing: the chateau in Luzany, Kladruby cloister with a unique cathedral built in a Baroque Gothic style, Gothic water-castle Svihov, imposing baroque architecture of cloister in Plasy, and so we could continue with the list.

This collection is available in both English

and Czech

versions.

Milos Wimmer, May 1998