At Kozel Castle near Pilsen, they started collecting entrance fees to the park, to help with its maintenance

Entrance fees to the vast castle park began to be collected for the first time this year at the classicist state hunting castle Kozel near Pilsen. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the park every year, and its maintenance costs millions of crowns. The entrance fee is collected from April 1 to the end of October, an annual season ticket with an unlimited number of entries costs 200 crowns, a one-time entrance fee costs 60 crowns. The charging of the park partially compensates for the fact that, unlike other monuments, Kozel has reduced the entrance fee this year, from 180 to 160 crowns, said Jan Polívka.

“Our effort is to constantly improve and improve maintenance, which brings increased financial costs. If we want to maintain the quality of maintenance, we have no choice. Annual maintenance costs several million crowns – for example, this is 2,500 liters of fuel, 6.5 tons of waste, which every year we dispose of visitors, six of our gardeners work intensively on this, as well as other members of our team, and we also have to use the services of external suppliers,” the castellan listed.

For example, according to him, the park administration had to pay for the treatment of several trees last year, while according to Polívka, the cost of treating one tree for tree climbers can reach 50,000 to 60,000 crowns. “We pay for the spraying of rhododendrons, which is our backbone bush, and visitors come to see them. Last year we fought a rare fungal disease, those sprayings cost us several tens of thousands of crowns, and this year we have to repeat them,” he said.

The castle park near Kozlo was created from the second half of the 19th century in a landscape markedly divided in height, which its author František Xaver Franz used to plastically model the space and create numerous vistas through the park and the surrounding landscape at several height levels. There are cascading lakes, birch bridges and gazebos.

“We manage 35 hectares of areas that are intensively farmed. There are several hundred species of trees, not only our own, but also foreign ones. This ranks us among the parks with the widest fund, whether it is coniferous or deciduous trees,” said Polívka . A rarity of the park, for example, is the more than 150-year-old and almost 30-meter-tall tulip tree in front of the riding hall. The circumference of the trunk is over three meters and it blooms profusely in June with yellow-orange flowers, reminiscent of tulips.

Kozel Castle was visited by 22,085 people in last year’s main visitor season, of which three fifths went on tours of the castle and two fifths went to one of the large exhibitions in the riding hall. However, park attendance was ten to twenty times higher before charging. “We have not counted the visitors to the park in any way yet, using sociological methods we have several estimates. We expect the annual attendance of the park to be between 250,000 and 500,000 visitors,” added the castelán.

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