The Lednice-Valtice landscape is what happens when a very rich family decides to make a whole district into a garden. For centuries the Liechtenstein dynasty owned this corner of southern Moravia, near the border with Austria, and from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century they reshaped it, planting woods, digging ponds and building follies, until castles, parks, canals and farmland were composed into one huge designed scene about two hundred square kilometres in area. UNESCO listed it as a cultural landscape in 1996.
Valtice, a small town of under four thousand people, is the baroque heart, with a large palace used by the Liechtensteins as a summer residence. Lednice, a few kilometres away, has a neo-Gothic chateau with a glasshouse and a minaret, about sixty metres tall, built in the 1790s as a romantic touch. The fanciful buildings scattered through the parkland include a colonnade on a hill, a hunting lodge and a mock ruin, and the whole thing is meant to be found as you wander or ride along tree-lined avenues.
Wine is the local obsession, and Valtice is the capital of Moravian wine, with cellars, tasting rooms and a wine salon in the castle. The surrounding vineyards produce Grüner Veltliner, Riesling and Pálava, a local aromatic grape. Further east the Pálava hills, a limestone ridge near Mikulov, rise from the plain. Riding here is gentle: flat or softly rolling roads, avenues of oaks and poplars, and a few lazy bends past vineyards. Speed limits in villages are strictly enforced. Spring brings blossom, early autumn the grape harvest and golden light, and summers can be hot.
Valtice has a few shops and cafes and a fuel station nearby, and the larger towns of Mikulov and Břeclav have more. Schrattenberg, over the border in Austria, is only a few kilometres away, and the old frontier is now unmarked. Do not drink and ride, a point worth remembering in a wine town, but do buy a bottle for the evening, and try the sweet trdelník pastries.