Don’s Walks

 

Explore and understand this city by learning about its history

Don Sparling, the co-founder of the Brno Expat Centre, is a Canadian who has been living in Brno for more than 50 years.

Thanks to his interest in history, architecture, geography and people, he’s able to present various aspects of the city in an incomparable way. Since the beginning of the BEC, he has been offering Brno expats themed walks through the city, discovering places, stories and people from various phases and facets of the city’s history.

After his walks, you never see the city the same way again. You gain deeper insight into what makes Brno what it is today.

While a lot of research and meticulous preparation goes into each walk, it usually takes place once. For this reason, we decided to start recording the walks. Later, we teamed up with students from the Department of English at the Faculty of Education who created visual online forms of some of the walks as their semester project. Thanks to them, you can now read and, more importantly, walk the walks yourself, in your own time, and gain the same knowledge the original attendants did.

Walk the walks yourself

Here’s the list of past walks in alphabetical order. Those with an active link have been processed so far.

To do the walk, you’ll ideally need a tablet to see the pictures properly or at least a printout of the text, to guide you through the streets and stories.

Being Bourgeois – new residential and municipal developments of the city around the year 1900

Blackfields – Černá Pole, one of Brno’s most beautiful residential districts

Brno Bronx – a walk through a specific district with a tumultuous history of industrial heritage

Brno and Women – highlighting Brno’s female figures throughout history

Brno and God – a look at how religion shaped the city’s development

Brno and WW2 – the city’s experience before, during and after the war

Brno Commemorative – plaques and statues linked to significant Brno figures

Brno’s Ringstrasse – the city’s urban planning phenomenon that defines the city centre

Brno Then and Now – linked with the anniversary of 1989 Velvet Revolution, an insight into what was the city like before the polical changes and what changed

Eating and Drinking in Brno – insight into the city’s notable cafés, pubs, restaurants and bars, and how they shaped people’s social life throughout history

Musical Brno – focusing on the city’s notable composers and musicians

Parallel Worlds – a specific period where the Czech and German speaking populations of the city coexisted and how it shaped life here

Spirits of Brno’s Past – a walk through the City Cemetery

Staré Brno – discovering the oldest city district

Špilberk – history of the castle hill with everything around it

Walls, Gates and Marketplaces – significant public spaces that shaped the city

We want to thank Don Sparling for all his immense effort and enthusiasm in creating these walks, and Ailsa Randall, Matěj Brožek and all the students from the English Department for taking up the preservation project.

Lucia Konôpková and Katka Báňová

p.s. If you’re interested in more themes and ways of discovering Brno, check out the rich offer of the Tourist Information Centre’s self-guided walks.