Masaryk's Lime
Hradcany, Prague Castle
A president picked a tree, and an architect built a terrace around it. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, installed at Prague Castle from 1918, took to sitting on a bare rise above the Deer Moat under a lime already more than a century old, so he set Josip Plecnik, the Slovene architect he had put in charge of remaking the castle, to make the spot worth sitting in. Between 1922 and 1924 Plecnik terraced the slope in stone, planted it with vines and left the lime standing at the centre of a three quarter circle platform. Masaryk's own bench did not survive. Two stone ones now flank the tree, which the castle's own account puts at over 200 years old. Then the place disappeared: from 1948 the entire moat was a guarded military zone, shut for four decades, and it was Vaclav Havel who had it opened again, with the viewpoint restored in 1996. The trunk is the one thing the sources will not agree on, 249 centimetres in one survey and 349 in another, a gap too wide to split. The view is not in dispute. The Archbishop's Palace and the cathedral line up below you, from a bench under a tree, which is what the whole thing was built for.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Masarykova vyhlidka, Horni Jeleni prikop below Lumbeho zahrada, 118 00 Praha 1-Hradcany
On the terrace Plecnik built around it in the Upper Deer Moat, with a bench beneath it and the cathedral lined up below; the moat opens roughly April to October.
Free, but only when the Upper Deer Moat is open, usually April to October, roughly 10:00 to 18:00. The viewpoint itself sits inside the castle security perimeter and has been closed for stretches under different presidents; since 2021 it is reachable only from the Upper Deer Moat and not from Klarov. Check the castle's opening notices before making the walk for this tree alone.
8 min walk from the Brusnice tram stop (lines 22, 23), entering the Upper Deer Moat and climbing Plecnik's double staircase
In bloom
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
