Civic Swimming Pool

The oldest surviving river spa building in Prague was built in the classical and Empire styles. Today it no longer serves its original purpose.

The Civic Swimming Pool is one of the few buildings on the left bank between the Vltava and the Edvard Beneš Embankment. The building conceived in classical and Empire style dates from the year 1840, and its author is the architect Josef Kranner. At the same time, this is the oldest preserved building of the Prague river spas.

A slightly older building that was located at the site of today's Strakov Academy was destroyed by the flood of 1824. The swimming pool building served as a facility for bathers who also used the rafts on the Vltava River. In the 1869 the swimming pool was made accessible from Old Town via the Rudolf Footbridge, of which only a small half-timbered house on the left bank of the Vltava River near the Mánes Bridge has survived.

Beginning in 1906 the Civic Swimming Pool was the property of Prague and until the 1950s served as a swimming pool. Since 1998, it was the location of a Czech television show called At the Swimming Pool with Marek Eben, a popular talk show, which hosted important foreign and Czech guests across various disciplines and interests. Guests included Sting, Reinhold Messner, Suzanne Vega, Tonino Lamborghini, the Dalai Lama, Franco Nero, Bill Gates, Robert l. Fulghum, Madeleine Albright, Robert Redford, Pete Sampras, Ivana Trump, Richard Gere and more than 600 other figures.

The Civic Swimming Pool building is rented and today houses a restaurant.