Kutná Hora sits about 70 kilometres east of Prague on a ridge above the Vrchlice river, and for about a century in the late medieval period it was the second most important city in the Bohemian Kingdom — wealthy, powerful, and architecturally ambitious in a way that has left a remarkable legacy. The riches came from silver: a rich seam discovered in the 13th century made the town effectively the mint of Central Europe, and kings and princes fought over control of it. The silver ran thin by the 16th century, but the buildings remained.
The historic centre is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its architectural crown is St. Barbara's Church, a Gothic cathedral begun in the late 14th century whose three soaring tent-like roofs are visible from a distance across the vineyards. Inside, the nave is extraordinary — it was built by Benedikt Ried and Matyáš Rejsek, the same architects responsible for Prague's finest late Gothic work. The Italian Court, the royal mint, is the other centrepiece — a fortified palace in the centre of town where silver coins were struck and kings occasionally resided.
The most unusual attraction is some distance from the centre, in the suburb of Sedlec: the Sedlec Ossuary, a small chapel whose interior is entirely decorated with the bones of some 40,000 people. The bones were arranged in the 1870s by a local woodcarver into elaborate chandeliers, coats of arms, and garlands that line every wall. It sounds macabre and it is, but it is also genuinely extraordinary and unlike anything else in Europe. The Sedlec Abbey nearby, a UNESCO-listed cathedral of rare Baroque-Gothic refinement, is far less visited despite being one of the finest buildings in Bohemia.
Kutná Hora makes an easy day trip from Prague, but a night's stay allows you to see the cathedral in the evening light and to explore the town after the day-trippers leave. The medieval town centre is compact and walkable, with several good cafés and a few restaurants scattered among the steep lanes.