
The Castle Garden
Baroque noble garden with a cascade fountain, Rococo summer house, and a theatre whose whole audience rotates.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Castle Garden in Cesky Krumlov centers on an oddity hidden among its Baroque hedges: a rotating auditorium built so the audience, not the stage, would turn to face a new backdrop. It traces the garden's shift into an eighteenth century showpiece anchored by the Rococo summer house Bellarie, finished in 1757, then jumps to 1958, when theatre people from Ceske Budejovice tested the idea with sixty spectators on a circular platform, pushed around by forty stagehands climbing inside. Look past the parterre toward Bellarie's cream-colored facade as you walk in.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Revolving auditorium
Rotating open-air theatre in a castle garden, once turned by forty stagehands, now silent on electric motors.
Castle Theater
Baroque court theater with original eighteenth-century rope-and-winch stage machinery still in working order.
Letohrádek Bellarie
Rococo garden pavilion hiding an eighteenth-century dumbwaiter that served meals with no servant in sight.
Kaskádová fontána
Rococo water cascade of sea deities and seasons, restored after decades of neglect nearly ruined it.
Kvítkův Dvůr
Baroque farm-turned-pleasure-court with rococo interiors painted with scenes of rural labor.
Cloak Bridge
Three-story covered stone bridge with a hidden corridor once used by nobles to reach the castle theatre unseen.