Is your child still fresh and active after a long full day? Then this is precisely the right moment to pay a visit to one of the observatories or planetariums found not only in Prague but in a great many other cities. Children can enjoy a range of interesting programmes, and the very atmosphere of the starry heavens almost within reach will be an incomparable experience.
The Štefánik Observatory (Štefánikova hvězdárna) on Petřín Hill in Prague offers year-round public viewings of the daytime and night-time skies.
- An interesting diversion during this trip is the ride in the cable car from the foot of the hill (Újezd) to the top of Petřín.
- In addition to the observatory, children will love a walk through the Hall ofMirrors on Petřín Hill with 31 regular and 14 distorting mirrors.
- After this, a good corrective is a trip up the Petřín Tower. From this miniature version of the Eiffel Tower, you get a unique view of Prague from a height of 51 metres.
Other observatories that offer public stargazing and planetarium programmes can be found in Brno, České Budějovice, Hradec Králové and Ondřejov outside of Prague.
Other places enjoyed equally by young and old are open-air village museums.
- Only 30 km east of Prague, in Ostrá near Lysá nad Labem, you can visit the Village of Crafts and Artwork and see and try for yourself how the common people of centuries past earned their daily bread, how they amused themselves, how they played, what they ate and how they dressed.
- The oldest and most extensive museum of this type in central Europe is the Wallachian Open-air Museum (Valašské muzeum v přírodě) in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm. The museum contains almost 120 historic buildings, concentrated in three areas – the Wooden Village (Dřevěné městečko), the Wallachian Village (Valašská dědina) and the Mill Valley (Mlýnská dolina). The Wooden Village contains fascinating wood-framed buildings, the Mill Valley has a series of functioning water-works – a grist-mill, iron-mill and sawmill – and the Wallachian Village has fields growing authentic regional crops amidst wooden buildings transported from all corners of Moravian Wallachia.
- The most recently opened village museum in the Czech Republic is in Zubrnice, and is based on a historic village among the hills of the Central Bohemian Mountains, consisting of half-timbered farmhouses, a village school, a shop and a church. At the centre of the green stands a rebuilt Baroque well and just below the village is a small railway station with an exhibit of historic rail carriages.
