Lednice–Valtice Cultural Landscape

The Lednice–Valtice Cultural Landscape in southern Moravia is one of the largest designed landscapes in Europe, shaped between the 17th and 20th centuries by the ruling princes of Liechtenstein. Across some two hundred square kilometres they wove together grand architecture and cultivated countryside: the Baroque château of Valtice and the flamboyant neo-Gothic palace of Lednice with its vast greenhouse and English park anchor a rolling terrain of lakes, ponds, avenues and ornamental buildings. Scattered through the parkland stand romantic follies — a minaret, a mock ruin, classical temples and colonnades — designed as focal points and picturesque surprises. The whole ensemble was conceived according to English romantic principles of landscape design, marrying built and natural beauty on an extraordinary scale. Inscribed by UNESCO in 1996, it endures as a harmonious and remarkably intact example of the aristocratic ideal of the landscape as a total work of art.