Lány Castle, Renaissance and Baroque château in Lány, Czech Republic

Lány Castle is a Baroque building on the southern edge of Lány, west of Prague, with a pale yellow facade centred on a projecting entrance bay. A dark bell-shaped dome with a spire rises behind a low balustrade, and orange-red hipped roofs with dormer windows cover the wings. An arched wooden door sits at the base, with climbing plants on the lower walls.

A wooden manor at Lány is first recorded in 1392 under the nobleman Hašek of Lány. In 1592 the old fortress was rebuilt as a ground-floor Renaissance hunting lodge, probably to a design by the Italian architect Aostalli, with sgraffito decoration and water moats. The Valdštejn family added a storey in 1730 and the Fürstenbergs a second one in 1821–1825.

The village name Lány comes from the old Bohemian word for dividing land into strips. In the castle park stands an antique fountain with Doric pilasters and five lions spouting water, standing for Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Slovakia and Subcarpathian Ruthenia, the five pillars of the First Republic. The castle itself is closed and guarded by the castle guard.

The main building remains closed to visitors, but the surrounding park and its walking paths are freely accessible to the public year-round. The grounds are easy to navigate on foot and provide good views of the buildings and natural landscape.

Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia, is buried in the Lány cemetery on the castle grounds, making it a site of national memory. This burial place transformed the estate into a place where people can pay respects to a founding figure of the modern Czech state.