The Sedlec Ossuary is decorated with the bones of approximately 40,000 people. Chandeliers made of every bone in the human body hang from the vaulted ceiling. Garlands of skulls run along the walls. A massive coat of arms of the Schwarzenberg family, assembled entirely from human remains, covers one corner. It is one of the strangest and most affecting places in Europe — and it is a 55-minute train ride from Prague’s main station.

But Kutná Hora is considerably more than the Bone Church. The town itself is a UNESCO-listed medieval silver mining settlement — the second most important city in Bohemia during the 14th and 15th centuries, when the silver beneath it funded the construction of Prague’s Gothic monuments. St. Barbara’s Cathedral, built in 1388 and still unfinished at the Hussite wars, is one of the finest Gothic churches in Central Europe: flying buttresses, a forest of pinnacles and an interior that makes most Czech cathedral interiors look restrained. The medieval Italian Court (Vlašský dvůr), the Stone House, the Jesuit College with its panorama terrace above the valley — a full day here barely scratches the surface.

Český Krumlov is three hours from Prague and the journey is completely worth it — I want to say that clearly because the distance puts some people off. The town sits in a loop of the Vltava river in South Bohemia, with a 13th-century castle complex on the hill above that is the second largest castle in the Czech Republic after Prague Castle. The medieval old town below — cobbled lanes, a central square ringed by Renaissance houses, the river on three sides — is genuinely as beautiful as its photographs suggest, and photographs of Český Krumlov are very beautiful.

The castle itself covers several epochs: Romanesque foundations, Gothic towers, Renaissance facades, Baroque theatre with the most complete preserved Baroque stage machinery in Europe. The castle gardens above the bend in the river give a view down onto the terracotta rooftops and the river coiling below that is one of the classic images of Central European travel. The town fills with tourists in July and August — which is not a reason to avoid it, but is a reason to arrive early and walk the castle gardens before 10 AM when the tour groups reach them.

Karlštejn is the most visited castle in the Czech Republic and the easiest day trip from Prague — 40 minutes on the train, a 20-minute walk uphill from the station through a village that has been selling castle-branded souvenirs for at least a century, and then the castle itself rising above you on a limestone ridge with forested hills on all sides. The silhouette — steep towers, Gothic battlements, the Great Tower with its golden crown — is the defining image of Bohemian medieval architecture.

The castle was built between 1348 and 1365 by Emperor Charles IV — the same king who built Charles Bridge, founded Charles University and commissioned St. Vitus Cathedral — specifically to house the Bohemian crown jewels and the imperial regalia. The Chapel of the Holy Cross, entirely covered with semi-precious stones and gold leaf and containing over 100 panel paintings by Master Theodoric, is the finest medieval decorated interior in the Czech Republic and requires a separate advance-booked tour.

Karlovy Vary is unlike anywhere else in the Czech Republic — a Belle Époque spa town in a narrow river valley, with six colonnades built over natural hot springs that have been drawing the European aristocracy since the 17th century. Peter the Great, Goethe, Beethoven, Chopin, Schiller, Karl Marx (who wrote parts of Das Kapital here) and dozens of Austro-Hungarian emperors all took the waters. The architecture that accumulated around the springs — grand hotels, ornate colonnades, a casino and a theatre — gives the town an opulent, slightly surreal quality unlike any Czech city.

The springs themselves are free to drink — each colonnade has taps dispensing mineral water at different temperatures and mineral compositions. Buy a spa cup (porcelain beaker with a spout, sold everywhere) and work your way along the colonnades tasting each spring. The water ranges from pleasantly warm to scalding and sulphurous; the experience is peculiar and unmistakably local. The Diana Tower above the town, reached by funicular, gives the best view of the valley layout. The Becherovka distillery tour explains the herbal liqueur that has been made here since 1807.

Terezín is the hardest day trip on this list and the most necessary one. The town was a Habsburg military garrison fortress before the Nazis repurposed it in 1941 as a concentration camp and transit ghetto — the first stop for the majority of Czech and Moravian Jews on the way to Auschwitz and other extermination camps. Approximately 140,000 Jews passed through Terezín between 1941 and 1945. Around 33,000 died there from starvation and disease. More than 88,000 were transported east to their deaths.

The memorial site includes the Small Fortress (a Gestapo prison where conditions were particularly brutal), the Ghetto Museum in the former school building, the Magdeburg Barracks (documenting the extraordinary artistic and cultural life that prisoners maintained under impossible conditions — concerts, theatre, lectures, children’s drawings) and the Jewish Cemetery with its mass graves. The Pinkas Synagogue in Prague’s Jewish Quarter, with the names of 77,297 Czech Jewish victims on its walls, is directly connected to Terezín — many of those names passed through here.

If you want to leave the city entirely and find yourself in landscape that looks like nothing else in Central Europe, the Bohemian and Saxon Switzerland National Park is the destination. The park straddles the Czech-German border along the Elbe river valley — on the Czech side, spectacular sandstone formations, table mountains and the Pravčická Gate (Pravčická brána), the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe at 26 metres wide; on the German side, the Bastei Bridge rock formation and boat rides through the Kamenice Gorge. A full day covers both sides comfortably.

The Pravčická Gate is the centrepiece — a natural arch worn through a sandstone ridge over millions of years, with a 19th-century hunting lodge (Falcon’s Nest) built directly against it that now serves as a restaurant with a terrace view through the arch. The walk from the car park or bus stop to the gate takes about 45 minutes on a clearly marked trail. The Kamenice Gorge boat ride (flat-bottomed boats poled through narrow gorge cuts in the sandstone) is one of the most unusual experiences in Bohemia.

Vyšehrad is not really a day trip — it is 20 minutes from Prague’s Old Town by metro — but it belongs on this list because most visitors to Prague never go there, which is one of the more significant missed opportunities in the city. The rocky promontory above the Vltava south of the city centre is where Prague’s founding myth is set: Princess Libuše stood here in the 8th century and prophesied the founding of a great city, summoning the ploughman Přemysl from the fields below and beginning the Přemyslid dynasty that ruled Bohemia for 400 years.

The Vyšehrad Cemetery — the national pantheon — contains the graves of the most significant figures in Czech cultural history: Antonín Dvořák, Bedřich Smetana, Alfons Mucha, the writer Karel Čapek, sculptors, painters, writers and composers accumulated over 150 years of national independence. The Basilica of St. Peter and St. Paul is a neo-Gothic twin-towered church visible from the river below. The Casemates — underground fortress galleries — contain the original Baroque statues from Charles Bridge. The rotunda of St. Martin, the oldest standing building in Prague, has been here since the 11th century. The views from the ramparts over the Vltava are some of the best in the city.

Teplice is the oldest spa town in Bohemia — the springs have been used since the 12th century — and the least visited major spa destination in the country. Where Karlovy Vary fills with international visitors throughout the summer, Teplice remains largely Czech and largely unhurried. Beethoven visited multiple times in the early 19th century and composed here; the famous unsent letter to his “Immortal Beloved” is thought to have been written in Teplice in 1812. The castle above the town, the spa colonnade, the château gardens and the relative quiet of a town that has been overlooked by the tourist circuit all give it a character that Karlovy Vary, for all its grandeur, has traded away for foot traffic.

The Teplice Castle is a Renaissance château converted from a medieval foundation, now housing the regional museum with archaeological collections and Beethoven memorabilia. The Lázeňský park — spa park — is the green heart of the town, with the colonnade at its centre. The spa tradition is still active: several of the original spa hotels continue to offer treatments, and the town has a genuinely functioning therapeutic culture rather than a tourist-facing replica of one.