Muskau Park

Muskau Park is a landscape that ignores a national border. The Lusatian Neisse runs straight through it, and since 1945 the river has divided Germany from Poland, leaving the castle and the formal approaches on the German bank and roughly two-thirds of the park on the Polish side. Yet seen from its terraces and bridges it reads as a single composition: wide meadows, stands of native trees, still water and long views that draw the river, the surrounding hills and even the small town of Bad Muskau into one picture. In 2004 UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site shared by both countries, recognising it as a masterpiece of the landscape park and a model for landscape architecture well beyond Europe.

The park is the life's work of Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau (1785–1871), an eccentric aristocrat, traveller and writer. In 1815 he set out to turn his estate into a landscape park, and he kept enlarging it until 1845. His long stays in England, where he studied country house parks, shaped the design, but he went further than his models by working with native plants and treating the town itself as part of the scenery. He set out his ideas in Remarks on Landscape Gardening, published in 1834, the only book he issued under his own name. Debts forced him to sell Muskau in 1845; he moved to Branitz near Cottbus, created a second park there and was buried in an earth pyramid in one of its lakes. His pupil Eduard Petzold continued the work at Muskau under the new owners.

The New Castle at the heart of the park was burned by Soviet soldiers in May 1945, and for decades the border left the two halves neglected. In recent decades German and Polish conservators have restored the paths and plantings together; the castle's exterior was rebuilt by 2011, the Double Bridge was reconstructed in 2003, and the English Bridge across the Neisse, demolished in 1945, was rebuilt in 2011 to rejoin the two banks.

Getting there

The park lies between Bad Muskau in Germany and Łęknica in Poland, on either bank of the Neisse. The nearest larger town is Weißwasser in Saxony, about 7.5 km away; on the Polish side the nearest larger town is Gubin, about 45 km to the north. The nearest airport is Dresden (DRS), about 81 km away; in Poland the nearest is Zielona Góra-Babimost (IEG), about 99 km away.