Lánská obora, Nature reserve in Ruda, Czech Republic
Laner Tiergarten is a nature reserve near Ruda in the Czech Republic, enclosed by old stone walls and covering a mix of woodland and open meadows. The area is home to hoofed animals such as deer, wild boar, and mouflon, which move freely within the walls.
The Waldstein family enclosed the hunting ground with a 47-kilometre wooden fence in 1713, when it covered 96 km². In 1816 Joachim von Fürstenberg abolished it and replaced it with two smaller enclosures, the Lány one for red deer, later surrounded by a stone wall. The Czechoslovak state bought the estate with the enclosure in 1921 as a summer residence for the president.
The name 'Tiergarten' is an old German word for an enclosed animal park, a term once used widely across Central Europe. Visitors walking through the area can still see the old stone walls that mark the boundary of the former hunting ground.
Most of the game park is fenced and closed to the public; only the unfenced outer part is freely accessible, and marked hiking trails run around the perimeter. A roughly 4 km educational trail, half of it inside a separate demonstration enclosure, opens from April to October daily 9:00–19:00 for walkers and partly cyclists.
Although the area is now protected land, it functioned as a closed hunting ground for centuries, and the animals living there today are descended from those originally introduced by its noble owners. The stone walls that enclose the site are so well preserved that they give a clear sense of how the original enclosure looked.
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