Spotlight | All stories

For this edition of Spotlight I have come to the Narodni hrebcin, or National Stud, at Kladruby in central Bohemia. Here, by the banks of the River Elbe, unique Old Kladruber horses have been bred for over 400 years.

The countryside you'll see on a drive down to Cesky Krumlov makes the trip worth the gas money. Roll over the hillsides along the E-55 highway - some are bright green with grass, others are golden canola fields that stretch for miles. The views make the three hour trip pass quickly, and give you high expectations when you pull into the old South Bohemian town. Expectations that the town exceeds.

The small, picturesque town of Ceska Kamenice is situated in northern Bohemia, about 105 km away from Prague. It is a late gothic town on the river Kamenice, where three protected landscapes - the Lusatian Mountains, Czech Switzerland and the Bohemian Central Highlands - meet. Despite its modest population of 5,500, the town has 34 monuments, the care of which earned it the title "Historic Town of the Year" for 2005.

The North Bohemian town of Litomerice has long enjoyed the reputation of being one of the Czech Republic's most beautiful sites. Founded roughly 1,000 years ago, Litomerice lies in one of the Czech Republic's hilliest ranges on the confluence of the Elbe and Ohre Rivers. The town's beginnings were originally a Slavonic fort overseeing a number of small municipalities, later replaced by a castle and emerging town in the 11th century.

With the arrival of spring in the Czech Republic the tourist season is beginning to slowly re-awaken and with it a favourite Czech pastime - visiting the country's many castles and chateaux with family and friends. In that spirit today we visit the royal castle of Krivoklat - a most remarkable site with a history that stretches back to the 12th century. Found on a promontory of rolling hills overlooking deep woodlands, Krivoklat was a favourite of King Wenceslas IV. He used it primarily for leisure and sport, preferring it to his father's more

The massacre of Lidice, a small village just North West of Prague, on the night of the 9th of June 1942 was the darkest moment in Czech wartime history. Following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the German Reichsprotektor of the Czech Lands, on the 27th of May 1942, the Nazis began a massive retaliation campaign against the civilian Czech populace. Lidice bore the brunt of this savage response, accused of harbouring one of the perpetrators of the assassination.

The Edlmans are a Czech-Slovak couple who chose to escape the stresses of London and build a very different life in a castle in the west of Scotland. Castle Levan is located on the outskirts of the sea-side town of Gourock, less than an hour from Glasgow. I'll let the owners introduce themselves:

There seems to be no end in sight to the rush of cars on Milada Horakova avenue in Prague, one of the main arteries leading through the Czech capital. It is a day when temperatures are soaring to record highs - somewhere in the neighbourhood of thirty degrees Celsius. On the other side of the throughway, Prague's famous Letna park and Letna plain, where Czechs as well as foreign visitors and residents go to rest, exercise, have picnics, take lovely walks and generally appreciate the most outstanding views of the city there are. Let's not stay a

This week we travel about 150 km south of Prague to one of the gems of South Bohemia - the spa town of Trebon. Trebon lies in a protected landscape area with a beautiful countryside, vast thick forests and a dense concentration of fishponds.

An hour and a half's journey south of Prague lies the medieval Hussite town of Tabor. On first arrival, as you step out onto a busy square from the packed train station, the place looks nothing out of the ordinary. But once you pass the bustling high street in the newer area of town, the cobbled and winding paths of the Old Town lined with their quaint houses make this a location where you can feel history at every turn. And indeed history is something of which there is no lack in Tabor.