Průhonice Castle
The Průhonice Castle (Pruhonitz) located in the municipality Průhonice at the southeast end of the district Prague-west in the region of Central Bohemia in the Czech Republic , about 10 kilometers from Prague center.
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In the origins of an ancient fortified complex dating back to the Romanesque period , the property was soon in a small castle of Gothic redesigned. In the 16th century, this changed to a renaissance - castle . In the 18th century, Count Johann Nepomuk von Nostitz-Rieneck acquired the castle and had it redesigned in the Empire style and expanded into the 19th century. His granddaughter and sole heir of the property, Marie Antonie Gabriela Countess Nostitz-Rieneck, married Count von Silva-Tarouca , Ernst (Czech: Arnošt) , who came from a Portuguese noble family . From 1889 to 1894 Count Silva-Tarouca had the complex fundamentally redesigned ("reconstructed") by the architect Jiří Stibral into a family residence in the historicist style (more precisely in a Czech version of the neo-Renaissance ). Hanuš Schwaiger created the paintings and Celda Klouček created the sculptures.
The castle has served as a backdrop for Czech fairy tale films several times.
park
However, Průhonice is particularly famous for the park next to the chateau. It was created from 1885 as the life's work of Count Ernst Silva-Tarouca, who died in 1936, in collaboration with the German botanist and garden designer Camillo Schneider . The layout in the style of a classic English landscape garden includes parts of the valley of the Botič river and is enriched with several ponds and typical small-scale architecture. The park became one of the largest arboretums in Europe with around 8,000 trees in 1,500 species and varieties, including around 1,200 deciduous trees and 300 conifers . The rhododendrons are strongly represented among the deciduous trees , with around 100 species or varieties. Also worth mentioning is a three hectare Alpinum with 3000 plants and a rosarium . Together the park contains around 600 different, often rare species and varieties.
In 1909 the Dendrological Society was founded in Průhonice, whose own experimental garden with plants imported from all over the world is now part of the Dendrological Garden of the Research Institute for Garden Design in Průhonice. In 1927 Count Ernst Silva-Tarouca sold the entire property to the Czechoslovak state . The park is now looked after by the Botanical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic , which has been based in the castle since 1962.
Today the park covers an area of almost 250 hectares , crossed by a network of almost 40 kilometers of footpaths. It is open every day, whereas the castle itself is not open to the public.
The Průhonicer Park is under protection as a national nature park and was and was, along with the old town of Prague, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO and included in the list of historical gardens of ICOMOS .
Web links
- Website of the Průhonice municipality about the park (English)
- Full website to the park and castle of Průhonice (English)
Coordinates: 50 ° 0 ′ 1 ″ N , 14 ° 33 ′ 25 ″ E