Liberec Favorites

Favorite thing: The city centre is pedestrian zone. From the Market square (Nam. Dr. E. Benese) with the town hall down to Soukenne Nam. leads a narrow street called Prazska.

The street is very narrow and so you'll have problems to take good photos. Anyway, I enjoyed the facades of the townhouses very much - mostly from the turn of 19th/20th century. Some of them are beautiful Art Nouveau style, pretty much influenced by Prague and Vienna.

Almost all houses are beautifully restored, an exception in Liberec ... but don't have a look in the backyards :-)

Favorite thing: Well, which to start with... they're so much. At least I can say that here everything is on its right place. Liberec is a very green city and it's built on several hills. This makes it look very fresh and attractive. Here comes also the beautiful architecture from different styles. And so on.

Fondest memory: Best memory... all about this place where I felt great. What do I miss most? Everything.

Favorite thing: Liberec / Reichenau had a majority of German speaking inhabitants at 1938, when it became the administrative capital of the " Sudetenland " that was occupied by Germany during the 2nd WW.
Most of the Czech population had to leave the town immediately, being expelled by the german troops...
After WW II the germans were expelled from Liberec, and lost all of their properties there.

Fondest memory: On my pic : A detail of the streetlamp in front of the theatre in Liberec....

....The lamp was constructed in times when Reichenau was part of the Austrian empire, a lamp that saw Germans&Austrians come and go - it saw the communists come and go - and it still looks great today, looking forward to the times when Czechia,Austria and Germany are part of the EU...

Favorite thing: Almost all houses of the townsquare have these great arcades that allow shopping and walking any time without getting wet on a rainy day.

Fondest memory: Many restaurants use these arcades as well for their garden-restaurants - a great place to watch people go by on the boulevads of Liberec...

Favorite thing: In the side-entrance of Hotel Praha you may see this lovely Art Nouveau fountain - a relict of better times at the end of the 19th century.
Unfortunately I could not find any more infos about the artist in any of my books.
Detailed guide-books about Czechia " Off the beaten paths " are unfortunately quite rare still and hardly to be found.

Favorite thing: At some places of Liberec / Reichenberg you may still see the glory and prosperity of the times around the end of the 19th century, the time, when architects from Vienna were ordered to build more or less copies of buildings of Vienna.
On my pic is " Kavarna Posta " , a traditional " Wiener Kaffeehaus " , where people went to spend the afternoon, sipping a coffee, reading lots of newspapers and meeting friends and business-partners.

Favorite thing: Liberec / Reichenau is the 3rd largest city in Czechia today with about 100.000 inhabitants.
It is Czechia's centre of Wool- and Textile-production. In 1906 Lidove Sady, Bohemia's first Zoo was built in Liberec.

Favorite thing: It is the largest city of northern Bohemia, noted for its textile industry and exhibition fairs. At the end of the last century, a high neo-renaiss Town Hall was built in the town centre.
Old timbered houses can be seen at Vetrna Street. The town and Jested mountain (1012m) are connected by cableway (about 10 ski-lifts on the Jested slopes).