Climb to the castle no army ever took

The first thing every visitor to Pernštejn Castle meets is the barbican — a squat fortified gatehouse with walls three metres thick, built with crenels for light firearms and a machicolation above the gate, designed to make the narrow approach as miserable as possible for anyone trying to force it.

It worked. When a Swedish army besieged Pernštejn Castle in 1645 during the Thirty Years' War, the barbican held, and the castle was never taken — one of the few in the region that can make that claim across more than seven centuries. Scorch marks from the Swedish cannon are still visible on the upper towers.

Beyond the Gothic rooms, Pernštejn Castle's Knights' Hall is the interior's set piece — a large first-floor room rebuilt under the Renaissance-era Pernštejns, its vault decorated with stuccowork and fresco paintings that turned a medieval fortress into a residence fit for one of Bohemia's grandest families.

Nearby, a long hall built with three fields of Renaissance cross vaulting has served as Pernštejn Castle's library since the 19th century, when the Mitrovský family filled it with the books and art collections that came with owning one of Moravia's great houses. Both rooms sit on the same Route I circuit, a few steps apart.

Pernštejn Castle's chapel is the one clearly Baroque note inside an otherwise Gothic-Renaissance building. The current chapel was built in 1716, replacing an older castle chapel, and decorated with fresco paintings by Francis Gregor Ignacus Eckstein.

Set against the castle's older stonework, the chapel is a reminder that Pernštejn Castle was never frozen at one moment — each generation who lived here added its own layer, from the Gothic Barborka tower to this 18th-century chapel, without ever demolishing what came before it entirely. It sits only a short walk from the Knights' Hall on the Route I circuit, a small, quiet room worth a slower look.

A ticket to Pernštejn Castle books you onto Route I, "From the Gothic to the 20th Century" — a roughly 80-minute guided tour that runs from the entrance hall and Tyrolean courtyard through the Gothic circular corridors, the Tower of Four Seasons and the old chapel, into the Knights' Hall, the picture gallery, and family rooms including the bedroom, children's room and governess's room.

It is, in effect, a walk through the whole span of Pernštejn Castle's life, room by room, from the 13th-century fortress to the 19th-century family home the Mitrovskýs made of it. Groups are capped at 35 visitors, and the tour can only be taken with a guide.

We say this plainly rather than let it be a surprise: Route I at Pernštejn Castle is guided in Czech, with a printed English text provided so you can follow the tour room by room. A limited number of fully English-guided departures run by advance reservation, mainly for larger groups.

For most independent travellers, the printed English notes are enough to follow the rooms and their history without losing the thread, since the guide's pace through each room gives you time to read as you go. If an English-speaking guide matters to your visit, tell us your date and group size when you book and we'll check what's possible.

East of the barbican, fenced and unmissable, stands an ancient yew tree with a trunk roughly 4.5 metres round — reckoned the oldest and largest of its kind in the South Moravian region. Local legend holds that a traveller's walking staff, planted on the spot before the first stone of Pernštejn Castle was laid, took root and grew into the tree.

Below the castle, terraced gardens first laid out in 1798 combine a late-Baroque cascading design with a formal parterre and a more informal landscape planting of beech, lime, maple and yew — restored in recent years and well worth the short walk down from the gate.

Pernštejn Castle's genuinely medieval silhouette has made it a favourite film location for decades, most famously standing in for "Castle Frankenstein" — heavily disguised with CGI — in the 2004 Hollywood production Van Helsing, one of the largest film shoots ever staged in the Czech Republic.

Long before that, Pernštejn Castle appeared in dozens of Czech fairy-tale films and television productions, and it continues to draw international productions today. Unlike many castles built or rebuilt purely for spectacle, Pernštejn didn't need dressing up to look the part — the walls a camera crew films are the same ones the Pernštejns actually built.

Pernštejn Castle was founded probably between 1270 and 1285 by the Lords of Medlov, who soon took the castle's name as their own. Over three centuries the Pernštejn family built one of the great fortunes of the Bohemian crown lands, reaching its height under William II of Pernštejn, whose house became, by most accounts, the wealthiest and most powerful noble family in the Kingdom of Bohemia.

The Pernštejns sold the castle in 1596. It passed through the Stockhammer and Schröfl von Mannsperg families before the Mitrovskýs bought their way into it in 1818, holding it until 1945, when their ownership ended and Pernštejn Castle passed into Czechoslovak state hands, as happened with many great Moravian estates at the close of the war.