A bridge with a job to do
Charles Bridge has connected Old Town to Malá Strana and the castle hill since the 14th century, commissioned by Holy Roman Emperor and Czech King Charles IV after the previous bridge was destroyed by flooding. It's a genuine piece of medieval engineering, resting on 16 arches, and it's still entirely pedestrian — no traffic has crossed it in decades.
The statues
Thirty baroque statues and statue groups line the balustrades, added mostly in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Most of what you see today are replicas; a number of the fragile originals have been moved to museums (several to the Lapidarium of the National Museum) to protect them from weathering. Look for St John of Nepomuk partway across — a small bronze relief near his statue is polished gold from centuries of visitors touching it for luck.
When to actually go
By mid-morning in high season, Charles Bridge is genuinely crowded — a slow shuffle rather than a walk. The fix is simple: come at sunrise, when the light is best anyway, or come back after 10pm when the crowds thin and the towers are lit. Either end of the day, you'll get a very different bridge to the one in the postcard-crowd photos.
The towers at either end
Both ends of the bridge are marked by towers you can climb for a view back along it — the Old Town Bridge Tower is the more architecturally significant of the two, considered one of the finest Gothic gates in Europe.