Lednice Castle
Zámek Lednice
Interesting facts
- The entrance hall is lit by a brass chandelier with 116 arms weighing about 690 kg, converted to electric light by Siemens in 1903.
- The palm greenhouse is glazed with some 52,000 panes shaped like fish scales, and its cast-iron columns are moulded to look like bamboo stalks.
- The carved spiral staircase in the library, which led up to the princes' apartments, is said to have been made from the wood of a single tree.
- Prince Alois II, who ordered the neo-Gothic rebuilding, had represented the emperor at Queen Victoria's coronation and collected watercolours of English houses by Joseph Nash.
- The greenhouse was built with the English engineer Peter Hubert Desvignes, following the model of a London winter garden.
- The avenue planted in 1715 between Lednice and Valtice was lined with 2,201 trees, including limes, horse chestnuts and poplars.
- From the 1630s the Liechtensteins grew orange trees here, and the orangery remained the family's pride until the 1890s; water reached the fountains through hardwood pipes bound with iron.
- The village of Lednice is first mentioned in a charter of the Bishop of Olomouc dated 1222.
- The pond in front of the castle holds 16 artificial islands, some linked by bridges, and white storks nest in the park every spring.
- Prince John II of Liechtenstein held Lednice for 71 years, from 1858 to 1929.
Why it is worth it
Lednice Castle looks as though it had been lifted from the English countryside and set down in southern Moravia: a white palace of pinnacles, battlements and pointed windows, standing on the right bank of the Dyje (Thaya) amid one of the largest designed landscapes in Europe. It owes its present form to Prince Alois II of Liechtenstein, who between 1846 and 1858 had the older residence rebuilt in the Tudor Gothic Revival manner. His court architect Georg Wingelmüller was even sent to England to study the style first-hand.
The Liechtensteins held Lednice from the fourteenth century until 1945. The site began as a fortified manor guarding a river crossing; it became a Renaissance chateau in the late sixteenth century, and around 1700 a Baroque palace with a riding hall and stables linked to Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and Domenico Martinelli. The neo-Gothic rebuilding gave the state rooms carved coffered ceilings, panelling, inlaid parquet and marble fireplaces; the library has a free-standing spiral staircase of carved wood said to have been made without a single nail. Even by 1850 the castle had flushing toilets, hot and cold running water and warm-air heating fed from stoves in the cellars. Beside it stands a cast-iron greenhouse built in 1843–45, about 92 metres long, roofed with tens of thousands of panes and holding tropical plants including a cycad estimated to be several centuries old.
The park around the castle was reshaped in the early nineteenth century into an English landscape garden with ponds, islands and follies. The most striking is a minaret designed by Josef Hardtmuth and built between 1797 and 1804, a rare example of Moorish-style architecture in the Czech lands; there is also an artificial castle ruin, Janův hrad, from 1807. In 1715 a long tree-lined avenue was planted to connect Lednice with the family's other seat at Valtice. The whole Lednice–Valtice area, shaped deliberately by one family over three centuries, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1996.
Getting there
The castle stands in the village of Lednice, about 7 km from the town of Břeclav, an important railway junction on the lines linking Brno, Vienna and Bratislava. The nearest airport is Brno-Tuřany Airport (BRQ), about 40 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Lednice–Valtice Cultural Landscape is a cultural-natural landscape complex of 283.09 square kilometres (109.30 sq mi) in the South Moravian Region of the Czech Republic. It comprises the municipalities of Lednice, Valtice and Hlohovec, and the rural area of Břeclav.
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