Prague travel guide - when to go, what to see, what it costs

Two nights is enough for the core: the Old Town and the astronomical clock, Charles Bridge, the castle and St Vitus, and an evening in a proper pub. The centre is compact enough that none of this requires transport, and a weekend visitor who starts early both days will not feel cheated.

Three nights is the trip we would actually plan. The extra day is for the Prague that does not fit between the two big sights: the Jewish quarter's synagogues and cemetery taken slowly, Vysehrad's quiet ramparts, an unhurried lunch away from the corridor, and an evening in Vinohrady or Karlin where the tables around you are Czech. Add a fourth night if you want a day trip - Kutna Hora, an hour away by train, pairs a magnificent medieval town with the famous bone chapel. A full week is more than Prague itself needs; at that point you are using it as a base for Bohemia, or you should be splitting the trip with Budapest or Krakow, each an easy hop away.

Prague's climate is continental and it does not blur the seasons. Summer runs warm to hot, with July afternoons typically in the mid-twenties Celsius and thunderstorms that arrive fast; it is also the peak for crowds, and the famous corridor is at its worst from June to August. Winter is properly cold, with January daytime temperatures hovering around freezing and light gone by four in December, but the city wears it well: the pubs and cellar restaurants are at their best, and the Christmas markets on the Old Town Square and Wenceslas Square run from late November into the first days of January.

For the balance of weather and space, aim for late April to May or September to early October: mild days, long evenings, and a noticeably thinner corridor. May brings the Prague Spring international music festival, which opens in mid-May and fills the concert halls rather than the streets. October brings the Signal light festival, four evenings when installations take over the squares and facades. Neither will crowd you out of a hotel the way December's markets can.

The fares tell their own version of this calendar. On our measured route below, the cheapest months are late autumn and deep winter - November, January, February - while December sits clearly above the winter months either side of it, because the Christmas markets pull demand. From there the floor climbs through spring into summer. If you want Prague at its cheapest to reach and its emptiest to walk, November and the post-holiday winter are the same answer twice.

One date to treat with care rather than avoid: New Year's Eve. The Old Town fills with a huge informal street party and the following day's official fireworks have come and gone in recent years, so do not build the trip around a display that may not happen. And if quiet is the point of your visit, skip the December weekends entirely - the markets are lovely on a Tuesday morning and a crush on a Saturday night.

Vaclav Havel Airport sits about fifteen kilometres west of the centre with no direct rail link. The standard way in is the trolleybus line 59 to Nadrazi Veleslavin, where you step onto metro line A for the centre; allow about forty minutes door to door. The Airport Express coach runs directly to the main railway station if you are staying near it. Buy a public transport ticket from the machines or the transit app before boarding, and validate it: the system runs on timed tickets - short ones for a single hop, a ninety-minute one covering the airport run, and day passes that pay for themselves quickly.

In the city, walk the centre and use trams for everything else. The tram network is dense, frequent and runs through the night on reduced routes, and a tram window is the cheapest sightseeing in Prague; line 22 in particular passes the National Theatre, crosses the river and climbs behind the castle. Avoid hailing taxis on the street in tourist areas, a long-running source of inflated fares; the ride-hailing apps that operate in the city are cheap, honest and everywhere. You will not need or want a car.

The classics are worth ordering at least once each: svickova, beef in a silky root-vegetable cream sauce with bread dumplings and cranberries; goulash, darker and less paprika-led than the Hungarian kind; roast duck with red cabbage; and smazeny syr, the fried-cheese guilty pleasure. The reliable way to eat them well and cheaply is the weekday lunch menu - poledni menu - that most pubs and many good restaurants chalk up, a two-course set at a fraction of the evening price. In the evening, the rule of thumb is one street of separation: menus with photographs and flags a few steps from a major sight are the city's worst value, and the plain pub two corners away is usually its best.

Beer is the national institution and the pub - hospoda - is its church. Look for the word tankovna, meaning the pub serves unpasteurised tank beer delivered fresh from the brewery; it is a genuinely different and better glass. A polite warning about the trdelnik, the chimney-shaped pastry sold from every other window in the centre: it is a tourist import, not a Czech tradition, and no local is in that queue. Eat one if it smells good; just do not file it under authenticity.

Prague is one of the best-served low-cost destinations in central Europe and the fares reflect it. Below is the cheapest one-way we have measured into PRG from each origin we track, with the date we saw each figure so you can judge its freshness. As the chart higher up the page shows, the month you fly moves the price more than anything else you control; the late-autumn and deep-winter windows are where the floor lives. If Prague is one candidate among several, the cheapest flights from Vilnius rank everything we price from that airport by its measured floor.