Royal Garden

The gate on the northern side of the Second Courtyard leads to the Powder Bridge (Prašný most; 1540), which spans the Stag Moat (Jelení příkop) and leads to the Royal Garden (Královská zahrada), which started life as a Renaissance garden built by Ferdinand I in 1534. The most beautiful of the garden’s buildings is the Ball-Game House (Míčovna; 1569), a masterpiece of Renaissance sgraffito where the Habsburgs once played a primitive version of badminton. To the east is the Summer Palace Letohrádek; 1538-60), or Belvedere, the most authentic Italian Renaissance building outside Italy, and to the west the former Riding School (Jízdárna; 1695). All three are used as venues for temporary exhibitions of modern art. A footpath to the west of the Powder Bridge (on the castle side) leads down into the Stag Moat, and doubles back through a modern (and rather Freudian) red-brick tunnel beneath the bridge. If you then follow the path east along the moat you’ll eventually end up at a busy road that leads down to Malostranská metro station. A gate on the outer wall of the castle, overlooking the moat, leads to a nuclear shelter started by the communists in the 1950s but never completed; its tunnels run beneath most of the castle.