Petřín Lookout Tower
— — the city's small answer to Paris's iron one.
Not only on a wall.
“Built in 1891 for the Jubilee Exhibition, two years after the Eiffel cast its first long shadow over Europe. Sixty-three and a half metres of riveted steel on a hill that already lifts the city. From the upper platform the river bends are legible all the way to Vyšehrad. The walk up through the orchards on the south face is gentler than the funicular.
Petřín Lookout Tower, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Petřín Lookout Tower stands at the top of Petřín Hill in the Malá Strana district of Prague, on the left bank of the Vltava across from the Old Town. It was completed on August 20, 1891 for the General Land Centennial Exhibition, two years after the Paris Eiffel Tower opened, and was directly inspired by it. The tower itself is 63.5 metres tall; the hill carries the upper viewing platform to 318 metres above sea level, the highest accessible point in central Prague. 299 steps wind to the top.
Steel, not stone — but the same family of late-19th-century lattice engineering. The tower was funded by the Club of Czech Tourists after a delegation visited the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and came back determined to build their own. The design, a roughly one-fifth-scale octagonal lattice by František Prášil, took just four months to erect in 1891. It survived both World Wars without structural damage, lost its original broadcast antenna in the 1990s, and was fully restored for the city in 1999.
The tower opens daily, with shorter hours from November through March. As of 2026 the standard adult ticket runs under 200 CZK; the small mirror maze beside the tower is a separate ticket. The Petřín funicular runs from Újezd in Malá Strana up to the summit and is included in any Prague public-transit pass. The climb on foot from the river is 30 to 40 minutes through orchards on the south face, gentler than the funicular line suggests. A lift inside the tower was added in 1999.