The princes of Liechtenstein owned this corner of southern Moravia for centuries, and they treated it as a canvas. Over more than three hundred years they shaped a landscape of about 200 square kilometres between the towns of Lednice and Valtice, with palaces, hunting lodges, ponds, avenues and follies set out as part of a single garden. UNESCO listed it in 1996 as one of the largest artificial landscapes in Europe, and the effect is that you pass from one scene to another as if you were walking through a painting.
Lednice Castle is the showpiece, a Neo-Gothic palace with pointed windows and turrets, and its park holds a Minaret, a slender tower about 60 metres high built in the late eighteenth century as a decorative fantasy. You can climb it for a view across the plain. Valtice, a few kilometres south, has a large Baroque palace and the national wine salon, a collection of Czech wines. Between them runs the Thaya river, the Dyje, with floodplain forest, oak woods and ponds full of birds, and the Pálava hills rise to the east. The whole region is also a centre of Moravian wine, and white wines such as Veltliner and Riesling are the thing to try.
For a rider, the ride is flat and gentle, along straight, shaded avenues and quiet roads through vineyards. Many people explore by bicycle, and the roads are shared with cyclists, especially at weekends in summer, so ride calmly. Spring and early autumn are beautiful, and the grape harvest in September adds colour and the sweet smell of fermenting must in the villages.
Lednice is a small village of about 2,300 people, and Podivín and Hlohovec nearby have a few shops. For fuel and larger supermarkets, Břeclav, about 7 km away with roughly 26,000 people, is the nearest, and Mikulov, with its castle on a hill, lies a short way south. The border with Austria is close, and Vienna is about an hour's drive. A glass of wine on a terrace, a plate of fried cheese and a walk along the pond makes an easy afternoon.