Spotlight | All stories

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.

If Prague's Veletrzni Palac or Trade Fair Palace didn't house the modern art collection of the National Gallery, most of us would probably not notice the large building that stands just a few metres away from the city's exhibition complex. But the Palace is one of Prague's earliest and largest buildings in the Functionalist style.

Welcome to Spotlight, Radio Prague's travel programme taking you on a continuing journey through the Czech lands. In today's edition, though, not a destination but a look at trends in tourism. This week, the state-run agency CzechTourism, together with the private Association of Czech Travel Agencies, released tourism statistics for 2005 as well as the forecast for 2006. According to the survey, the outlook for the Czech tourist industry this year will once again be favourable.

For this week's Spotlight we're in one of the most beautiful regions of the Czech Republic, the Krkonose or Giant Mountains, straddling the Czech-Polish border, a hundred kilometres north-east of Prague. These are the Czech Republic's highest mountains, rising well over a thousand metres, and at this time of year, they are decked with a thick blanket of snow. The Giant Mountains is a wonderfully poetic and evocative name... and indeed Krkonose does have its very own legendary giant, known as "Krakonos" in Czech and "Ruebezahl" in German.

Today we travel to eastern Bohemia where I visited one of the country's regions that's true to its name - Cesky Raj, which translates as Bohemian Paradise. It's an area that encompasses sandstone rock formations that somewhat remind us of Stonehenge or miniature Grand Canyons, fairy tale hills that hide precious stones, romantic castles and chateaux with a colourful history, and picturesque folk architecture - to name just a few of the region's attractions. It is not hard to see why the Bohemian Paradise was given the honour of being labelled a

One of the most beautiful towns in Moravia and historically an important location in the Czech Republic is Znojmo - a town whose foundations date back to the 11th century. For centuries Znojmo guarded the regions of southern Moravia, part of an elaborate chain of defending castles along the Dyje River and the border with Austrian lands, developing from a promontory fort to medieval stronghold and local seat of administration for the Premyslids - the first line of Czech kings. By the mid 1200s Znojmo was dominant, complementing neighbouring castles

The Czech Republic is a country with a fascinating industrial heritage all too often overshadowed by the Renaissance or the Baroque. Anyone who has ever travelled through Prague's formerly working-class districts of Karlin and Holesovice, for example, or has cycled in the north or east of the country, will have taken note of beautiful but crumbling 19th century factories, forgotten textile plants and old mills, falling apart girder by girder, brick by brick.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Spotlight; today we visit the sleepy town of Mnisek pod Brdy, south of Prague...the first recorded mention of Mnisek dates back to 1352. Lying on an important trade route, merchants used it as a stopover on their way further south. Today this charming little town attracts numerous visitors from all over the country and abroad, drawn by the thick forests that surround it and the Brdy Hills which rise up just behind the town.

Spotlight this week comes from Uherske Hradiste, a charming picturesque town in south-east Moravia. Like so many places in this part of the world, Uherske Hradiste has a rich and complex history. As tour guide Lenka Kornelova explains, the town was established nearly eight centuries ago in reaction to the turbulent events of that time and the city actually gets its name - meaning "Hungarian Fortress" - from this period.