Rozhledny: the towers you ride to
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Czechia is made of modest wooded hills, none of them quite high enough to see over the next one. For two hundred years the answer has been to build a tower on top and charge twenty crowns to climb the steps. There are hundreds of them, and collecting them is a recognised pastime: families keep stamp books.
They are also, almost by definition, exactly where a cyclist wants to end up. The top of a hill, a road or a forest track to the door, and a view that only exists because somebody built it. The oldest here is the minaret in the Lednice park, sixty-five metres of Romantic folly in a UNESCO landscape and the only one in the country.
The hills outlive the towers, and sometimes they win. Děd above Beroun was the first the Czech Tourist Club ever built, in 1893, and the forest it was raised above has grown up around it since, so the view from the top is now a gap in the trees.
On the map
Klucanina rozhlednaFrom the platform the Svratka valley spreads out below, framed by the silhouette of Květnice hill.
MinaretAt 64.8 metres high, this Romantic tower is the second-oldest surviving observation tower in the Czech Republic and the only minaret in the country.
Rozhledna Andrlův chlumA 50-meter steel lookout tower on the summit above Ústí nad Orlicí, nicknamed 'Stříbrná krasavice' (Silver Beauty) for its slender silver frame.
Rozhledna DědA squat 12-metre brick tower crowns the forested summit of Děd (492 m) above Beroun, its silhouette breaking the treeline on the climb up from the valley, th…
Rozhledna Městská HoraThe concrete tower crowns the wooded hill just west of Beroun's old town, and the climb to its covered terrace rewards you with a wide view over the town's r…
Rozhledna Na PodlužíA 30-metre steel lookout tower shaped like an oil derrick, built at the end of 2009 on a rise between Nový Poddvorov and Prušánky to commemorate Podluží's hi…
rozhledna VyšickoRozhledna Vyšicko is a wooden observation tower with a triangular ground plan, built in 2018 on the Vyšicko hill above the wine-growing village of Mutěnice.
The strangest of them stands at Nový Poddvorov: a thirty-metre steel frame put up at the end of 2009 in the shape of an oil derrick, because Podluží was one of Moravia's most productive oil fields and somebody decided the view should say so.