While I was planning my trip to Eastern Czechia, I was fed up to note that at least three palaces were on World Heritage List, Litomysl, Kromeriz and Lednice-Valtice, and I determined that to escape from this noble bombardment, only exterior of these palaces were enough for me. From Brno, it was just an easy drive to reach large landscape of Lednice-Valtice. I directly drove pass Lednice to the town of Valtice first. There was a straight road connecting these two towns, at first I expected to see beautiful landscape similar to Loire Valley or Versailles since many reviewers praised its beauty, but what I saw was an uninspired area of typical vineyards, dense forest and modern villages that I hardly believed to a fine example of man-made landscape, I did make a detour to see some famous follies along the lake shore; for example, Temple of three graces, but again nothing special which made me disappointed greatly.

However, when I reached Valtice, I was impressed with its townscape with lovely and harmoniously buildings. The star of this pretty town was its castle, while overall architecture was quite boring with typical Austrian baroque that could be found everywhere in former Austro-Hungarian territory, its front courtyard with stately stairs and two sculpture was perfectly designed, and I did a quick look at the castle’s chapel, its ceiling was just beautiful. Then I drove back to Lednice Castle, the main estate of Liechtenstein family of this domain. Its yellowish gothic exterior was quite impressive as it was really stunning and so different from baroque Valtice. Too bad that the layout of the castle and front garden was a bit confusing, from the car park entrance, the castle seemed to have two front courtyards with chapel in the middle of those courtyards making this castle like a big “M” letter. With these strange layout, the real entrance of this complex looked downgrade which contradict to typical landscape design. I walked to see the greenhouse which was attached to the castle. The greenhouse was lovely and quite interesting for its design and the surrounded French garden landscape was very standard. Then I walked to the rear gardens, this area was truly a highlight of Lednice-Valtice area. The landscape design of large English garden was quite impressive with genius mix of large lawn, lakes, dense forest and Islamic minaret as main folly. I leisurely walked to the minaret and backed to the castle, a well recommended with landscape garden enthusiast. In my opinion it possibly the best landscape garden in this region. I ended my trip with tasty food at local restaurant called U Korunky, its pork tenderloin and chocolate cake was quite classic.

The Lednice Castle and front courtyard of Valtice Castle were a highlight of this World Heritage Site in my opinion. While I could find similar royal/noble landscape in other parts of Europe, Lednice-Valtice was a really fine landscape, far better than many listed gardens in Germany, surprisingly nicer than royal Schonbrunn in Vienna or even Aranjuez in Spain where I visited a couple of months later. The only thing I felt with Lednice-Valtice was that the landscape was still pristine since its located far from any big city which could not be found in similar landscape of Potsdam. At least my initial concern that three castles of Moravia would bore me did not happen as these castles at least for exterior was totally different, Valtice and Kromeriz were quite similar actually, and made me happy to visit this place.