The name Litomyšl goes back to the year 981 when a hill fort was first mentioned in a Bohemian Chronicle. Today’s Litomyšl is a friendly little Czech town just waiting to be explored by tourists and with a brilliant Renaissance arcade-castle.

Vratislav of Pernštejn was the nobleman who took over the castle in 1567 and started its transformation into a large-scale palace with courtyards and porticoes covered with “s-graffiti”, a technique of wall decoration, where layers of plaster in contrasting colours is applied on to a moistened surface, and then scratched to produce a drawing. The interior of the Litomyšl Castle offers well-kept rooms and richly decorated salons and can also boast one of Europe’s three surviving 18th century castle theatres.

Below the castle hill lies the small town with the same name, a beautiful little town with one of the largest squares in the Czech Republic flanked by Renaissance and Baroque houses and arcades to keep you out of the rain or burning sun.