Orangery in the Letohrad Castle Park (exotic plants, Australian aviary and marine aquarium)

Letohrad, called Kyšperk until 1950, grew up beside a Baroque château built between 1680 and 1685 by Count Hynek Jetřich Vitanovský of Vlčkovice on the site of a Renaissance fortress. The landscape park dates from 1820-1830 according to the town museum, whereas Czech Wikipedia ties it to the château's mid-19th-century transformation. The orangery is a central element of it. According to a 2021 study in the journal Zprávy památkové péče, drawn from a survey by the Pardubice office of the National Heritage Institute, it appeared after 1811 and was deeply rebuilt after 1864 to plans by Josef Pöterz, with marked historicist features; a design for its front elevation dated 1864 survives in the Zámrsk state archive. A further alteration around 1926 gave it a mono-pitch roof, and after 1967 its south-west façade was entirely remade when the building became the club room of a pioneer organisation.

The town museum describes it as a heated greenhouse for exotic plants that would not have survived winter at the foot of the Orlické Mountains, and states that the oldest bonsai in Europe grew there: a Chinese juniper brought from Japan to Vienna in 1882, taken to Letohrad around 1928 and handed over in 1977 to the Liberec botanical garden. The building later hosted tea events and band rehearsals, and finally served as a store. A project was drawn up in 2020; the works, costing almost CZK 18 million (about CZK 30 million with the park), began in autumn 2021 with a Czech-Polish subsidy of more than CZK 20 million, approved at the third application. The heritage institute dates the end of the conversion to 2022; the public opening took place on 26 May 2023.

The building is a masonry structure of brick and plastered stone, set into a cut in the slope: its rear wall stands on a high plinth partly hidden by a terrace wall of opuka, a marly stone. According to the 2021 study, a long volume under a low-pitched gabled roof is crossed in the middle by a short perpendicular wing, whose ends form polygonal pavilions with flat pyramidal roofs. The roof overhangs rest on carved wooden brackets and the gables carry finials, in the spirit of historicism. The front of the growing section was fully glazed: a timber frame in two rows of tall rectangular panels on a low masonry parapet. Three tall chimneys marked the skyline, and the original heating system, best preserved in the western part, survived; it was uncovered again during the 2021 works.

The reconstruction, completed in 2022 according to the monument catalogue, brought the look closer to the earlier design: tall glazed rectangular surfaces in steel frames, large fixed glass panels on the left side, socialist-era brick piers kept, and a mono-pitch roof with two new red-brick chimneys. The historic glazed polygonal pavilion, known from the plans, was not restored; a new entrance projection with a round-arched motif replaces it. The building is therefore a masonry orangery with large glazed openings rather than an all-glass house.

The left half of the building again serves as an orangery: the sources mention subtropical plants, exotic flowers and bonsai, without listing them. The right half represents Australia. A red-rock set, presented by the museum as a scaled-down version of an Australian landmark, forms the backdrop of a giant aviary; according to the Czech News Agency (ČTK, May 2023) it holds sixteen birds of five species, including South American parrots, several pink cockatoos from Australia and a "kakadu inka" (Inca cockatoo) that, the museum says, no Czech zoo keeps.

A large marine aquarium of 800 litres holds more than thirty species of Indian Ocean fish and corals imported from the Australian coast. Small Australian animals complete the display, and white kangaroos live in an outdoor enclosure visible from the château. The animals are looked after by breeders who already kept an aviary at the château. The famous old bonsai itself left Letohrad in 1977 and is now in Liberec.

The orangery stands on the left of the path at the entrance to the château park from Václavské náměstí. The park, freely accessible all year, has a fountain with a nymph dated 1837 moved from the square, an Empire-style gazebo, an artificial grotto with a lookout, an aviary and, since 2023, an educational garden with a hornbeam maze. The orangery, run by the town museum, opens by season only: closed from November to February, by appointment in spring and autumn, more widely open from June to August (the museum page gives the detail). The neighbouring château houses the Jára Cimrman museum and small room, and a permanent exhibition run by the town museum that is being redesigned until autumn 2026.