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In this edition of Spotlight we visit Veltrusy Chateau, a gorgeous summer estate found north of the Czech capital. Founded in the 1700s by Czech nobleman Václav Antonín Chotek, Veltrusy is far from an obvious destination, but is well-worth a day-trip. The castle grounds boast a 300 hectare park along the Vltava River, with numerous paths leading among ancient trees to pavilions, a bridge or two and various monuments. Then of course, there is the chateau itself, highly valued as a gem of Baroque architecture.

The oldest and largest railway yard in Prague is soon to disappear. It will be replaced by a modern development with shops, apartments, offices and all kinds of other facilities as investors are ready to pour money into the area. In this edition of Spotlight, we look at the past and the future of the Bubny railway yard in Prague.

The summer months are here and with it tourists visiting many of the country’s most notable castles and chateaux. But one site you might want to consider visiting, somewhat off the beaten path, is Blatná Castle in southern Bohemia, some 95 kilometres south of the capital. It’s not an understatement to say Blatná Castle is something out of a fairly tale, overlooking a surrounding moat and deer park. Blatná is the location we visit in Spotlight today.

A town surrounded by deep pine forests, dotted with old timbered German-style villas and occasional Communist-era prefab houses, a town boasting many parks, a river, two churches – and the country’s first Buddhist temple. This is Varnsdorf, a town of 16,000 in the northernmost part of the Czech Republic.

Forget the Blue Danube, it’s the greeny-brown Vltava which is the watery muse of artists and musicians in this part of the world. The Vltava is the Czech Republic’s longest river, stretching more than 400 km. It is also the main waterway through the Czech capital Prague, and has been most famous in recent years for bursting its banks in 2002. The floods caused billions of crowns’ worth of damage to the capital alone, and put the city’s metro out of action for several months.

A bus of students and activists heads for Lety, South Bohemia, on May 13. They are driving to the site of a former concentration camp, set up by the Nazis to wipe out the Bohemian protectorate’s Roma population during the Second World War. Official sources say that 326 Roma perished in the concentration camp at Lety, while many hundreds more were transported from Lety to Auschwitz, where they were taken to the gas chambers.

SAPA is about as close as you are going to get to feeling like you are in Hanoi, or Ho Chi Minh City, while you are still, in fact, in Prague. At certain moments, and from certain angles, you can almost forget the prefab housing which surrounds the Vietnamese market, and believe that you are on a completely different continent. SAPA is the heart of the Czech Republic’s rapidly-expanding Vietnamese community, and not for nothing has it been dubbed ‘little Vietnam’. But unlike the Chinatowns that form an integral part of many a city, SAPA is miles

A rumbling engine drowns out the sounds of fellow passengers on the bus –somehow fitting on a visit to Mladá Boleslav, a town synonymous with cars and car engines. A little over a century ago, the first Czech bicycle, the first motorcycle, and eventually the first motorised buggy rolled out of what was then a modest factory in the town owned by mechanic Václav Laurin and former bookseller Václav Klement. Mladá Boleslav has been known for its car production ever since.

Hrabal’s book "I served the King of England" makes working in a restaurant sound very dramatic, and very glamorous. But the novel also suggests that such drama and glamour belong to a time now long gone. To find out whether this was true, I visited two of Prague’s most famous restaurants, to talk to their owners about their work from day-to-day.

It is early on a Friday morning, the air is freezing and there is no sign of the sun in the sky. Yet, the creaky old Karosa bus heading towards Krkonoše or Giant Mountains is almost full when I arrive at the bus station. Many people from Prague have taken their day off in order to enjoy some snow. Unlike most of my fellow travellers, I am not heading towards the ski slopes and racing tracks. My destination is the little town of Jilemnice, crouching at the foothills of the Giant Mountains in north Bohemia. Jilemnice was one of the very first skiing