When to photograph Vyšehrad?

Vyšehrad is the best view of Prague you don’t have to pay for. Everyone knows about it, everyone has been there once — and almost nobody goes back. What’s left is a memory of the view and one overexposed photo on your phone.

There’s one catch, though. People come here for sunset. It sounds logical: you’re standing on a rock above the river, looking across the water at the city, and the sun is setting somewhere ahead of you.

But when you look towards the Castle, you’re facing north-north-west — and in summer, when the sun sets furthest to the right, it’s almost in your frame. Anyone who’s tried it knows the result. The sky is pretty, the city below it is a dark strip with no detail, and the Castle you came for melts into the background.

Not in the evening — in the morning.

At dawn it’s exactly the other way round. The sun rises behind your back — over Pankrác in winter, much further to the left in summer, over Žižkov — and falls on the whole left bank from the front. The Castle, Petřín, the roofs of Malá Strana — all lit by soft warm light, no backlight, nothing to rescue in an editor afterwards. And the ramparts are empty.

I’m not saying an evening visit is pointless. It isn’t — it’s just a different photo. You’ll take home a silhouette, glints on the water and trains crossing the railway bridge against an orange sky. That’s a nice picture. It just isn’t the one most people have in mind when they head up here in the evening.

And one more thing people wait for in vain. From here, the sun never sets behind the Castle. In June it goes down over Smíchov, not far from Strahov. In December almost eighty degrees further left, somewhere beyond Smíchov railway station. Even on the longest day of the year it doesn’t make it behind the Castle.

The grounds are free to enter and open all year round. There are two ways up, and they aren’t the same: from Vyšehrad metro station you arrive on the flat, from behind; from the Výtoň tram stop you climb from the river up to the Cihelná (Brick) Gate. If you’re coming to take pictures, come from Výtoň — on the way up you’ll see things you can’t see from the top.