Hluboká Castle: The Complete Guide to the Most Beautiful Castle in the Czech Republic

In 1837, Johann Adolf II of Schwarzenberg and his wife Eleonore attended Queen Victoria's coronation in England. They saw Windsor Castle. And they decided they must have something like it at home.

What followed was one of the great acts of aristocratic ambition in Bohemian history — a complete reconstruction of their South Bohemian castle in the Neo-Gothic style, modelled explicitly on Windsor, completed in 1871, and universally considered today the most beautiful castle in the Czech Republic.

A Hluboká Castle day trip from Prague takes you 145 kilometres south of the city to see the result. Having seen it, it is hard to argue with the verdict.

The castle that wanted to be Windsor

The original fortress on this site was built by King Ottokar II of Bohemia in the second half of the 13th century. It changed hands many times over the following centuries — passing through royal ownership, the Lords of Hradec, the Marradas family and eventually the Schwarzenbergs, who acquired Hluboká in 1661 and retained it for nearly 300 years.

It was Johann Adolf II and his wife Eleonore who transformed Hluboká into what you see today. Inspired by Windsor Castle after their visit to England for Queen Victoria's coronation, they commissioned Vienna architect Franz Beer to carry out a complete reconstruction in the romantic Neo-Gothic style. Work began in 1841 and was completed in 1871. The result: 140 rooms, 11 towers and a silhouette that stops visitors in their tracks.

The comparison to Windsor is not accidental or approximate. Beer studied Windsor closely and replicated specific architectural details — the battlements, the towers, the proportions of the walls. Set above the Vltava River and surrounded by a vast English landscape park, Hluboká achieves something rare: a 19th-century castle that looks genuinely ancient, genuinely grand and genuinely at home in its landscape.

The interior

If the exterior of Hluboká surprises, the interior overwhelms.

The Schwarzenbergs were one of the great aristocratic collecting families of Central Europe, and the castle reflects several lifetimes of acquisition. The state rooms contain 57 Flemish tapestries — among the finest collections of their kind in Central Europe. Original Schwarzenberg furniture accumulated over generations. A portrait gallery spanning five centuries of family history. A library of over 12,000 volumes, the oldest dating to the 16th century — used by the Schwarzenbergs, who were known as voracious, polyglot readers.

Unlike many Czech castles where the interiors feel stripped after decades of Communist-era state management, Hluboká feels lived in. Because it was — until 1939, when the last owner, Adolph Schwarzenberg, emigrated overseas to escape the Nazis. The Gestapo seized the castle in 1940. In 1947, the Communist government nationalised it under a special law — the Lex Schwarzenberg — targeting the family's extensive Czech holdings. The family never returned. But the interiors survived remarkably intact.