Prague Castle

Prague Castle didn't begin as the grand complex you're standing before today. Back in 880 AD, Prince Bořivoj simply needed a defensible hilltop, so he built a wooden fortress here and called it done. What followed was twelve centuries of kings, emperors, and presidents who each decided to leave their mark on the place.

The most ambitious of them was Charles IV, who in the 14th century transformed the castle into an imperial residence worthy of the Holy Roman Emperor. He commissioned the Gothic cathedral you can see right now, though the builders took their time finishing it: the final stone was laid nearly 600 years later. The golden rooftops gleaming across the city during his reign gave Prague its famous nickname.

Not every chapter was glorious. A catastrophic fire in 1541 gutted much of the complex, and the Habsburgs rebuilt it in Renaissance style. Then, in 1939, Hitler spent a night here after marching into Czechoslovakia, which remains one of the darker footnotes in the castle's story.

Today the castle covers 70,000 square meters and still houses the Czech presidency, which means this ancient fortress has somehow outlasted every regime that tried to claim it permanently, and is currently beating all of them on tenure.