I know people who are into horses. Frankly, I am not one of those, that is unless served as a plate of pìcula 'd caval in Piacenza; simply delicious. Still, watching the horses playing on the paddocks around Kladruby was a nice experience. The whole area around the estate has been devoted and transformed to breeding horses and I simply could not stop taking pictures from all angles of the horses.

Historically, the estate was owned by a nobleman before being taken over by the Habsburg king when the noble ran into money problems (see Clyde for details). The Habsburgs bred two sorts of horses in Kladruby. White ones for earthly processions. Black ones for the church. To this day the estate is operated and has kept its original shape. Personally, I started to wonder about the practice of boxing horses, i.e. keeping them in rather small cages. Apparently, there are equestrians who feel it's a good option. To me, naively it felt wrong.

While I would rate my visit and the experience rather high, there are a few concerns I have with the OUV of the inscription.

1. You take away the horses and this goes really quickly down 1 star. As such, it's on the border (or past the border) of being an intangible cultural heritage.
2. This is a royal estate raising horses for royal and church rituals. It's not really representative of the general business of breeding work horses or war horses in the past.
3. Last but not least, horse breeding is a tradition I did not associate with Bohemia prior visiting. Don't get me wrong, I do world heritage sites to learn about history and culture, so this is appreciated. Still you wonder, why the horse breeding tradition of Spain/Andalucía or Hungary (which has a tentative site themselves) should be less relevant than Kladruby. Even more so when you consider that these are also Habsburg traditions. I think a comparative study would have been good prior to inscription.

Getting There

The closest train station is Řečany nad Labem (Řečany on the Elbe). The regional train runs between Kolin and Pardubitz and connects to trains from Prague to Brno/Ostrava. Coming from Prague, it's hardly possible to miss the connection as the intercity train and the regional train share tracks and the intercity takes precedence. Intuitively, there should be a connection to Kutna Hora, but I couldn't make it work.

From the train station in Řečany nad Labem,  it's a 45min walk along the road to get to the estate. You will cross the Labem/Elbe along the way which I enjoyed living downstream in Hamburg. You will also be crossed by some crazy fast Czech drivers which is not much of a pleasure. The bus connection mentioned by Ian and Matejicek could be alternative.

Tours for the estate can be reserved in advance, but I don't think you need to. Generally, these are held in Czech, so they give you a English leaflet and keep talking Czech. Personally, I found the tour lasting too long for the content shown (same as Zoe). Essentially they are showing you the stables with the horses and the central square of the estate. The best part to me where the horses running on the fields and those are for free.

There are two other stables you can visit. Being on foot and with a rucksack I did not try to.