Petřín Lookout Tower

What you see

An open steel lattice tower, unmistakably a smaller cousin of the Eiffel Tower, standing at the top of the hill above the orchards.

The story

The Petřín Lookout Tower exists because of a day trip. In 1889 members of the Club of Czech Tourists, which had been founded the year before by patriots around the ethnographer and patron Vojta Náprstek, travelled to the World's Fair in Paris. They were so overwhelmed by the Eiffel Tower that they decided to build something similar above Prague.

The Jubilee Exhibition planned for 1891 was the perfect excuse. As soon as they got home, they founded a cooperative to build the tower, put in the first money and got the plot from the city. The journalist and politician Vilém Kurz promoted it from the start.

The architect was Vratislav Pasovský, and the steel structure was designed by the engineers František Prášil and Julius Souček. The speed was astonishing. The iron structure was made in a record four weeks by the Prague bridge works in Libeň and carried up the hill.

It was built, like the Eiffel Tower, of mild steel with hot rivets, and the highest level, with its 299 wooden steps, was finished within three months. The top was crowned by a glass lantern and a model of the Crown of Saint Wenceslas, which also worked as a lightning rod. The original budget was thirty-two thousand gulden, and the real cost was more than double.

Less than four months after the work began, the tower opened, on the twentieth of August 1891. Prague people adopted it at once, and during the building they came in crowds to watch it grow. To get visitors up the hill, a funicular was built at almost the same time.

Its first trip took place on the twenty-fifth of July 1891, less than six months after work began, with modern carriages made by Ringhoffer of Smíchov. The Jubilee Exhibition itself, in the new exhibition grounds in Holešovice, was originally planned as a general fair, but many German businessmen in Bohemia boycotted it, so it became a showcase of Czech industry. It ran from May to October and attracted two and a half million people, and the biggest attraction outside the grounds was to ride the funicular and climb the new tower.

On a clear day the view reaches Říp, the Central Bohemian Uplands, the Brdy hills, the Ore Mountains and even the Krkonoše. Next to the tower you will find the building that houses the Mirror Maze. The exhibition pavilion of the Club of Czech Tourists was moved here in 1892, a copy of the lost Gothic Špička gate of Vyšehrad, designed by Antonín Wiehl.

Inside is a diorama by the brothers Adolf and Karl Liebscher, eight by ten metres, showing the defence of Charles Bridge in 1648 by Prague students against the Swedish army, and a maze of thirty-five mirrors added in 1893. In the 1960s another fourteen distorting mirrors joined them. The tower has had a more dangerous career than you might expect.

When Adolf Hitler visited occupied Prague in March 1939, he is said to have wished that the tower would be demolished because it spoiled the view from the castle. Luckily it never happened. In 1922 a radio broadcast was made from the tower to an agricultural exhibition in Stromovka, the first mass radio listening in the Czech lands.

The tower was closed to the public in September 1979 because of its poor condition, and reopened in 1991, the hundredth anniversary of the exhibition. Since 2020, it has been managed by Prague City Tourism. And it is a fun detail that, because it stands on a hill over three hundred metres above sea level, its viewing platform is higher above sea level than the top of the Eiffel Tower itself.

The tower's two staircases form a double helix, one for going up and one for coming down, so visitors never have to squeeze past each other. The tower has had several lives. In 1953 a television transmitter was installed on it, the original lift was taken out because cables filled its shaft, and for almost forty years it served as the television signal provider for Prague, until the Žižkov Television Tower opened in late 1992.

A new lift for elderly and disabled visitors was added during the reconstruction from 1999 to 2002. The hill is also served by the Petřín funicular, a small railway that climbs from Újezd in the Lesser Town. From the top, try to find landmarks you have already seen, such as Charles Bridge and Saint Vitus Cathedral.