Self-guided walk · Prague
The Prague historic pub walk is a self-guided route of 1.6 km between 3 old pubs, about 19 min walking, with a GPX file to follow. U Medvídků makes the oldest claim on it, 1466, and it holds the oldest record too, from 1438.
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Distances are walking estimates, 1.3 × the straight line at 5 km/h. These are history walks, not a drinking challenge: take it slowly, drink water between stops, and leave a pub out if the day is getting long.
Prague’s historic beer halls. Two brewing houses and one small Pilsner room, close enough to do in an evening. The route starts in the Old Town, crosses into the New Town that Prague City Tourism dates to Charles IV's foundation of 1348, and comes back. All three houses keep their oldest fabric below the floor you drink on.
Na Perštýně 7, 100 01 Praha 1 – Staré Město
A rambling Old Town beer hall where Budvar has flowed for generations and a tiny in-house brewery revives the 15th-century brewing tradition of the house. Brewing is recorded here from 1466. Under a Gothic timber ceiling locals and visitors share long tables, and the adventurous can try X-Beer 33, one of the strongest lagers in the world.
580 m to stop 2 · about 7 min
Křemencova 11, 110 00 Praha 1 – Nové Město
Prague's celebrated brewpub has been brewing its dark 13° lager on the same New Town site since at least 1499. Eight panelled halls and a leafy courtyard fill with long tables and accordion music, and waiters come round offering the house herb liqueur as well as beer. It is unashamedly busy, yet the beer, brewed only for the house, remains excellent.
1.0 km to stop 3 · about 12 min
Husova 17, 110 00 Praha 1 – Staré Město
The quintessential Prague Pilsner pub, loved by regulars who guard their tables fiercely. Writer Bohumil Hrabal held court here for decades, and in 1994 he drank with Václav Havel and Bill Clinton. The beer hall dates from 1816 in a medieval house, and the Pilsner Urquell, poured from cellar tanks, is among the best-kept in the city.
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Prague keeps its age underground and overhead, and the ground floor of a beer hall is usually the youngest part of it. At U Medvídků the barrel-vaulted cellars turn on a single central pillar and have been dated by archaeology to the second half of the thirteenth century; the stone portal on the street carries 1614 cut beside two bears, from a Renaissance rebuilding; and Gothic roof trusses and Renaissance painted ceilings survive upstairs, where hotel rooms were built into the roof after the house came back into private hands.
U Fleků works the same way. Gothic masonry survives in three of its cellars and rises in places as far as first-floor level, and the brewhouse beams are dated to the fourteenth century — but the eight panelled halls a visitor actually sits in were arranged between 1900 and 1910 by Rudolf Koukola and František Sander, which is why a house that has been brewing since 1499 feels, inside, like a building of 1900.
U Zlatého tygra is the plainest and the oldest-looking, and its documented drinking is the youngest of the three. Prague City Tourism has the house Gothic with its tower raised in 1514, the walking-tiger relief in place since 1702, and the sign changed from the Black Lion to the Golden Tiger by Jan František Lehr in 1786. Look up at the relief before you go in. More houses that brew are gathered under brewery taps, and the city’s other claimants are at the oldest pubs in Prague.
