Český Krumlov

Český Krumlov is a town the river decided to keep: the Vltava bends almost all the way around it, so tightly that the old centre is nearly an island of three hundred Gothic and Renaissance houses, and on the rock above the outer bank the second-largest castle in the country — after Prague's — climbs in courtyards and covered bridges to a tower painted like a music box. Below the tower, bears have lived in the moat since the 1700s. Behind it, a garden with a theatre whose whole auditorium turns to face the next scene. It is the Bohemia of the fairy tales, and it knows it, and it charges accordingly.

The traveller crosses the Barber's Bridge from Latrán, the quarter under the castle, and climbs to the courtyards; sees the Baroque theatre, one of two in the world with its machinery intact; walks the Cloak Bridge, a five-storey viaduct over the ravine, to the gardens; comes down to the square for the plague column and the smell of trdelník; finds the Egon Schiele Art Centrum, because the painter's mother was born here and the town first threw him out, then forgave him; and, on a summer afternoon, rents a canoe or a raft and floats the meander itself, ducking the weirs, seeing the town as the river does.

The Guide's honesty: Krumlov is small and famous, and between eleven and four in summer the lanes carry more selfie-sticks than citizens — so sleep here, and own the town at dusk and at dawn, when it is quiet, golden and yours —; the castle interiors are guided-only and the tower is the one queue worth its minutes; the rafting is real river with real weirs — wear what can get wet —; the trdelník is Hungarian by birth, but nobody will fight you over it; and Prague is three hours by bus, which is exactly far enough.