Prague Castle audio guide,
five stops, free.

Stand in the square with the railings in front of you and look up at the two stone giants on the middle piers. On the left one raises a dagger, on the right one swings a club, and each has an opponent already beaten underneath him. They are the first thing the castle shows you, and they are not subtle about it. What you are looking at are copies: the originals came from the workshop of Ignaz Franz Platzer, and the figures on the piers today were carved at the beginning of the twentieth century by Čeněk Vosmík and Antonín Procházka.

Now look past them, into the courtyard. It is younger than it looks. The whole front you see, three wings round an open court of honour, was built between 1759 and 1769 for Empress Maria Theresa by her architect Nicolò Pacassi. Before that, where you are looking, there was a moat. It separated the castle from this square, and Pacassi had it filled in, the buildings in front of it knocked down, and this grille put across the open side.

The arch at the back of the courtyard is the one thing here older than the empress. Matthias Gate carries a Latin inscription saying that Emperor Matthias had it made in 1614. There is a catch. The panel with his name is stucco, while the rest of the gate is stone, and so historians suspect the gate is some years older, probably ordered by Rudolf the Second before him, with Matthias adding only his name. It is counted as the oldest secular Baroque building in Prague, and it was a free-standing triumphal arch until Pacassi built his wings around it.

The two enormous flagpoles are a third layer again. Each is a single fir trunk from Moravia, tapering to about twenty-five metres, put up in 1925 to a design by the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik. After 1918 this became the seat of the president of the new Czechoslovak Republic, Tomáš Masaryk, and Plečnik was the architect Masaryk chose to make an imperial castle feel like a republic's.

It still is the president's seat. People here say the Castle, Hrad, and mean the head of state and his staff. And behind this one front the complex runs on for about 570 metres. According to the Guinness Book of Records it is the largest ancient castle in the world, almost seventy thousand square metres, and its history begins around 870 with a single walled church. Look above the palace roof and you can already see where you are going: the two dark spires of St Vitus Cathedral.

Out in the Third Courtyard, walk along the south side of the cathedral until the wall turns to gold. Three pointed arches at ground level, and above them a picture made of glass, glittering even on a grey day. This is the Golden Gate, and it is named after exactly what you are looking at: the golden background of the mosaic.

For most of the cathedral's history this, not the west door you used, was the grand way in. The porch was finished by 1368, in Peter Parler's time, and it is through this portal that the kings of Bohemia entered the cathedral to be crowned. The room directly above it is the Crown Chamber, where the coronation jewels are still kept.

The mosaic was made between 1370 and 1372, and it is the Last Judgement, read in three fields. In the middle, Christ sits as judge in an oval of light, surrounded by angels carrying the instruments of the Passion. Below him stand six Czech patron saints, Wenceslas, Adalbert, Vitus, Sigismund, Ludmila and Procopius, and their names run in a line of lettering underneath. Now drop your eyes below that line, to the small panel just over the central arch. Kneeling there, on either side, are Emperor Charles the Fourth, who began this cathedral, and his fourth wife, Elizabeth of Pomerania. The emperor who built the place put himself in the picture on his knees.

Then read the side fields. On the left, the dead are rising, pushing up the lids of their tombs and climbing out, and three angels receive the righteous. On the right, the archangel Michael swings his sword, and the damned are dragged away by blue devils into the fire. Higher up on both sides, the Virgin Mary and John the Baptist plead for mankind, with the apostles ranged beyond the two small windows.

It has survived six and a half centuries out of doors, with serious restorations in 1961 and again in 2000.

Before you move on, look left, at the foot of the great south tower. Charles's first architect, Matthias of Arras, died in 1352; Parler came from Swabia and took over in 1356, when he was only about twenty-three. The lower part of the tower you are looking at was begun by those first builders; above fifty-five metres come a Renaissance gallery and a Baroque dome, and the whole of it rises about a hundred metres. Set into its base is a stone tablet dated 1394, a medieval builders' progress report, still in place.

After a cathedral and a royal hall, and the red Baroque front of St George's Basilica that you passed on the way down, this is where the castle's servants lived. Walk slowly down the lane and look at the scale of it: doors you have to stoop for, windows the size of a book, and a chimney for every house.

The houses are built into the castle's northern wall. The wall came at the end of the fifteenth century, and in 1597 the marksmen who guarded the castle gates asked Emperor Rudolf the Second whether they could wall up its arches and make little rooms in them. A decree of the sixteenth of September 1597 said yes. They built at their own expense, then sold and rented to each other, and the rooms grew out into the lane until in places it was less than a metre wide. The additions on the far side were cleared away in 1864. Only one house, No. 13, still keeps to the original rule and stays inside its arch; look for the one that does not step forward.

Nobody agrees where the name comes from. Goldsmiths, say some. Alchemists, says the legend, which is almost certainly only a legend. Or it was a joke, the golden street in the poorest corner of Hradčany. What is certain is that people lived here until the Second World War, and the last residents moved out in 1953. The colours you see date from after that: the facades were painted to designs by Jiří Trnka, the painter and film-maker, in the 1950s.

Now find No. 22, the blue-white house with the number over its door. From November 1916 to March 1917, Franz Kafka came here to write, in a house his sister Ottla had found, and he wrote most of the stories of A Country Doctor in it. A few doors along, No. 14 was the home of Matylda Průšová, a card reader and clairvoyant known as Madame de Thèbes, who died after torture in a Gestapo interrogation. No. 12 belonged to the film historian Josef Kazda, who hid Czechoslovak films here during the occupation so they would not be destroyed.

At the east end stands the round Daliborka Tower, a cannon tower that was a prison from the start. Its first prisoner, in 1498, was the knight Dalibor of Kozojedy, and legend says he learned the violin in his cell; Smetana made an opera of it. Beyond it lies the way out, down the Old Castle Stairs to Malostranská, which is how the castle itself says most people leave.