Hluboká Castle

We almost skipped Hluboká. I remember looking at photos before the trip and thinking it looked too perfect, too white, almost fake against the green of the park — like someone had built a Disney castle and forgotten to age it. Lia was the one who insisted, mostly because she’d read that the whole thing was modeled on Windsor Castle, and she wanted to see what happens when a Bohemian noble family gets homesick for England in the middle of the 19th century. So we drove down from České Budějovice on a grey morning, and by the time the towers came into view above the trees, I understood the appeal. It doesn’t look like it belongs in Bohemia. That’s exactly the point.

The building underneath all that Neo-Gothic frosting is much older than it looks — a 13th-century Gothic royal residence that the Schwarzenbergs completely reimagined between 1841 and 1871. Our guide walked us through room after room, and by the tenth or eleventh I’d lost count, which isn’t surprising when the place has more than 140 of them. What stopped me wasn’t the sheer scale, though — it was the library. Over 12,000 volumes, spines catching the light from tall windows, and I found myself thinking about how many generations of Schwarzenbergs must have sat in that room reading by candlelight while their castle slowly grew into this improbable white fantasy outside.

The tapestries got to Lia more than the library did. Room after room of Flemish weaving, faces and hunting scenes and folds of fabric rendered in wool with a patience I can’t really imagine anymore. She stood in front of one for a long time, tracing details with her eyes, while I hung back and watched the light move across the pattern. It’s easy to see why over 200,000 people come through here every year — the castle earns its reputation as one of the most visited in the Czech Republic honestly, room by room.

Afterward we wandered the English-style park that wraps around the castle, and that’s where Hluboká really won me over — not the interior tour, as impressive as it was, but the way the grounds let you keep looking back at those towers from different angles, each one making the place seem a little more like something out of a story. We sat on a bench near the tree line with coffee from a stall by the entrance and just stared at it for a while.

When to go: Aim for April through October if you want to see the interior — the guided tours through those 140-plus rooms only run while the castle is open for the season. The park around it, though, is worth a walk any time of year.