Top Things to Do in Brno

Brno is the Czech Republic's second city and its most consistently undervalued, a place travelers bound for Prague routinely bypass and later regret missing. It sits at the confluence of the Svratka and Svitava rivers in central Moravia, with a compact, walkable old center that packs architectural centuries together in a space you can cross in twenty minutes on foot. The Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul crowns the skyline on its rocky outcrop, its Neo-Gothic spires visible from most of the city; Villa Tugendhat, a Mies van der Rohe residence whose plate-glass walls and open-plan interior made it one of the defining works of twentieth-century modernism, waits on a wooded hillside above the Černá Pole quarter carrying UNESCO World Heritage status. Walking between these two buildings, one medieval, one radically modern, you pass through the linden-tree-lined streets of the Baroque old town, where the smell of coffee from cellar cafes drifts up through iron gratings and the cobblestones feel cool and slightly uneven underfoot even in the height of summer. What separates Brno from other Central European cities of comparable scale is the strangeness packed beneath the surface. An ossuary under the Church of St. James holds the remains of tens of thousands of Brno residents, its vaulted corridors cool and damp and mineral-smelling, the bones arranged with a precision that reads as both memorial and municipal record-keeping. The Old Town Hall harbors a stuffed crocodile that has hung from its vaulted entrance passage since 1608, the informal symbol of the city, and a reminder that Brno has always maintained an oblique relationship with its own mythology. Then there is the 10-Z bunker system beneath the city streets, a Cold War nuclear shelter whose blast-proof rooms and filtered-air systems are among the best-preserved in Central Europe, smelling of damp concrete and stale air, the fluorescent lighting casting that particular institutional pallor of the early communist era. Brno rewards the curious far more than the dutiful, and visitors who arrive expecting a smaller Prague leave having encountered something altogether different. The city is also the way into two of Moravia's most compelling landscapes. To the north, the Moravian Karst plateau is a limestone world of gorges, caves, and vertiginous sinkholes, the Macocha Abyss drops through the karst surface with a silence at its base that feels geological rather than merely deep, its turquoise pool visible both from the bridges above and the cave passages below. To the south, the Lednice-Valtice area stretches toward the Austrian border through vineyard-covered slopes and mirror-still aristocratic fishponds, producing the Moravian white wines, Pálava, Welschriesling, Müller-Thurgau, that taste best drunk cold on a warm afternoon with the smell of cut grass and ripe grapes in the air. Brno requires at minimum three days to experience properly and rewards every additional day given to it.