Czech Greenways

Czech Greenways is a Czech civic organization founded shortly after 1989 by a group of Czech and American enthusiasts exploring ways to preserve the unique cultural and natural heritage of the Czech lands (more about Czech Greenways history...).

Czech Greenways works under the auspices of Czech Environmental Partnership Foundation with the help of Friends of Czech Greenways, a US civic organization. Czech Greenways was established as a sister project of the Hudson River Valley Greenway, New York.

The Czech Greenway Prague - Vienna is a designated corridor of more than 100-year-old hiking trails stretching for 250 miles through the Czech Republic to the Austrian border. If follows the Dyje River in Southern Moravia and the Vltava River in Southern and Central Bohemia. The beautiful countryside is perfectly matched with cultural monuments, historic towns and villages with restored castles and churches. Since much of the Czech Greenways stretches along the former Iron Curtain, where there was limited access and development for 45 years, the countryside remains quite untouched and the environment clean.

Development of the Prague - Vienna route through the Czech Greenways creates a model for sustainable regional development, conservation of cultural and natural heritage, and promotion of regional identity through low-impact soft tourism, non-profit initiatives and support to projects dedicated to renewal, preservation or development of local heritage.

Greenways projects

Society of Friends of Jewish Culture in Mikulov
During WWII the 400-year-old Jewish population of Mikulov has disappeared and in the proceeding four decades of Communism the Jewish monuments, including the large Jewish cemetery, have fallen into disrepair. The society is creating the gravestones database, with their Hebrew inscriptions translated into many languages. They also have created a trail through the former Jewish ghetto in Mikulov.

Frantisek Moric Nagl Memorial in Telc
The Phoenix Society in Telc presents a local Jewish painter murdered with his wife and children in Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz. The places loved by this artist are now connected by an educational trail. In the Telc town square you can find a small stone memorial just where, based on an old photo, he once stood painting a picture. At his favorite viewpoint by the road to Kostelni Myslova, his birthplace, is a stone table, where you can stop while going by...

Peasant and Emigration Museum in Kojakovice
A small museum devoted to the bygone every-day life of this rural village is set in the beautiful countryside of Southern Bohemia. As more and more locals move to urban areas, the village is becoming a relic of the past. The Rozmberk Society has transformed the former schoolhouse into a museum documenting the life of the local population and ties to its emigrants who were leaving for the United States massively at the end of the 19th century.

Slavonice Renaissance Society
Like many border communities, he town of Slavonice still suffers from the effects of the transfer of its population after 1945 and during the Communist regime. The Slavonice Renaissance Society is a civic association dedicated to reviving the community through a rich program of cultural events and community projects. In particular they are restoring town's numerous Renaissance houses dated back to the 16th century and their sgrafitto facades.

Moravian Wine Trails
The program has been working closely with wine-growing communities and other partners to preserve and exploit the rich wine-growing tradition of the area by developing environmentally friendly wine-tourism and small-scale wine production.

Travel along the Czech Greenways

Greenways Travel Club offers guided or self-guided walking tours along the Vienna - Prague Greenway.

Your reward is an intense cross-cultural experience, and a deeper knowledge of the land and its people than that provided by other tour operators and the usual mass tourism. As you get more aquainted with Central Europe, you will have the oportunity to talk to local people, and learn about their way of life and hopes for the future, a future which your personal participation in a Greenways tour will help to bring about. In doing so, you will help to solidify and strengthen these important ties of international friendship and common heritage.