Holašovice looks like a village painted from memory by someone who loved it. A long rectangular green sits in the middle, with a pond and a small chapel, and around it stand more than twenty farmhouses with gabled fronts in rich, ornate plasterwork, some in white and pale yellow and some in soft blue. The style is called folk Baroque, or peasant Baroque, and the houses were mostly built in the nineteenth century, when wealthy farmers dressed their gables in a local version of the grand style of the cities. It has been on the UNESCO list since 1998.
There is a story behind the survival of this place. Holašovice was in the Sudeten border region, where Czech and German speakers had lived side by side, and after the Second World War the German population was expelled. The village was left to decline and was close to the sealed border of the Iron Curtain, and many buildings were abandoned, but neglect also meant that nobody modernised them. After 1989 the village began a careful restoration, and now it is a living place again, with a few cafés and guesthouses. The big event is the Holašovice Peasant Fair in July.
The country here is gentle South Bohemia, a landscape of ponds, meadows, birch and pine woods, with the line of the Šumava mountains on the horizon. The roads are narrow and quiet, with a fair amount of cyclists, and surfaces are mostly decent, though patched in places. It makes a lovely afternoon loop out of Český Krumlov, about 20 km away. The best light is late in the day, and May, with its apple blossom, and September are very good.
For fuel and larger shops, České Budějovice, a city of about 96,000 people, lies only about 15 km away, and Křemže, a small town nearby, has the basics. Local food includes roast pork with dumplings and sauerkraut, carp from the region's ponds, especially around Christmas, and the beer of Budweis, the original Budweiser Budvar. Walk the green, look at the details on the gables and notice how quiet it is. Tourists come, but the village does not feel staged.