After Lednice and Valtice, the second World Heritage Site royal castle of Czechia I visited was Kromeriz, ironically this castle also owned by Liechtenstein family similar to Lednice and Valtice. The castle was located in the city center of Kromeriz which in my opinion a prosperous looking town. At first, I expected a typical design of royal palace with grand entrance next to city main square, but to my surprised, from the city square I could only saw the small portion of the palace complex, well at least its tower was quite striking almost similar to church tower. The palace’s exterior was a tiny poor version of Schonbrunn with similar Habsburg yellow Baroque, while there was no grand entrance or front garden courtyard. As I had no intention to see another baroque palace interior which I heard very similar to Schonbrunn, I directly walked to its rear garden. The garden was nice pure English garden without anything worth to remember especially after seeing a better one in Lednice yesterday.

Then I drove to another part of this World Heritage Site, the Flower Garden called Kvetna zahrada or Pleasure Garden, which located just outside the town center. In my opinion this was the true highlight of this UNESCO site. Behind the wall was the large complex of French styled garden together with many smaller gardens. At first, I went to see small greenhouse which seem to be designed for tourist’s souvenir photo. Then I saw what is called Dutch Garden, some kind of stylish vegetable farm, which I don’t know why it has been called like that. The center of the whole complex was the big rotunda, which was quite nice, but the real gem of the garden, at least in my opinion is the Italian styled loggia. The loggia was lovely with many sculptures and on the rooftop provide a great view of at least half of the whole garden showing intricate design of manicured and planned French garden, which quite impressive and could rival great gardens in France or Italy. There were two mazes which was fun to be inside. Unfortunately, half of the garden was empty with just large, abandoned lawn behind the hedges.

In my opinion this beautiful Flower Garden alone can be inscribed as World Heritage Site as the best French – Italian gardens in Eastern Europe, to my surprised that this garden was located in unknown corner of Moravia, well it was not too far from Vienna actually. Again, this was not a must see or great World Heritage Site, but a really fine garden to see.