You might expect the outdoor cinema nestled beneath the city walls beside Sv Vaclav cathedral to be a pleasant place to watch films under the stars, but it’s also a fairly lively place to listen to some music and have a few drinks with friends. Being outdoors, it’s only open in the warmer months of the year, approximately from the beginning of May until the end of September. Opening hours are subject to demand and weather conditions.

The entrance is on Pekární Street near the horseshoe-shaped building (Podkova). You can’t see the cinema screen and can just barely glimpse the beer garden from the street, but if you walk through the gates by the mini-golf course you’re in the right place. The huge outdoor beer garden has space for up to 1,000 people, and it’s often fairly busy. There’s no table service, so you’ll have to go up to one of the bars in the small wooden buildings backing up to the stone city walls. Most of the seating, the jukebox, and the open-fire grill are under the shelter of tarpaulins, so even changeable weather is not enough to disrupt the flow of beer and laughter.

The cinema itself is another matter. There’s no shelter and they insist on a minimum number of viewers before they will show a film. Fortunately, though, it doesn’t rain that often and the well-chosen films almost always attract enough of a crowd. There’s no assigned seating, and even if there was, most people would struggle to find the correct seat in the amphitheatre with a capacity of 4,000. Sometimes the films are new releases, Czech, or foreign (original language with Czech subtitles), and sometimes they are cult classics. The last films I saw there were Skrítek and Kill Bill 2, preceded the week before by Kill Bill. Entry to the films is around 70-80Kc, and they start as soon as it’s dark enough, which is about 9:30pm mid-summer.

The beer garden can get a bit rough at times. The cheapest beer in the centre attracts a wide range of characters, some of whom have been known to get a bit unruly (i.e. start fist fights) from time to time. The tough looking security guards and their pit-bulls look as though they can handle most problems, but they can’t be everywhere at once, so it’s probably a good place to mind your manners and make a special effort not to draw too much attention to yourself.