Minaret

A 302-step spiral stone staircase climbs through the tower to three stacked viewing galleries, and from the highest one the view opens out over the whole Lednice-Valtice park to the Palava hills, and on a clear day as far as the White Carpathians and the Alps. Prince Alois I of Liechtenstein had the tower built at the turn of the 18th century; according to local lore, its architect, Josef Hardtmuth, sketched the whole design in a single night, before going on to found the Koh-i-Noor pencil works and invent the modern graphite pencil. The ground here is swampy alluvial sand, so builders drove hundreds of wooden piles deep into it and capped them with an iron-clamped log frame to carry the tower's weight. As the structure rose, nervous workers grew wary of climbing the scaffolding, until a cavalry corporal rode his horse up the ramp to the very top to prove it was safe. The tower's ground-floor rooms, once used to display the Liechtensteins' exotic collections, reopened to visitors in 2017 after a long restoration.