AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Stará Dyje — the "Old Dyje," also called Černá Dyje — is the meandering, abandoned channel of the Dyje River that still wanders through the water-meadows and floodplain forest of the Lednice–Valtice Cultural Landscape in South Moravia. When the river was straightened in the 1970s, this romantic old arm was left behind; today, in a UNESCO-listed estate of parks, ponds and hunting follies, it curls past the Minaret and Janohrad before slipping back into the regulated flow, a quiet watery lane beloved of boaters, anglers, birds and beavers.↗↗↗
An old river in a garden landscape
For centuries the Dyje roamed a wide, braided floodplain here, splitting into side-channels, oxbows and pools that fed a living landscape of wet meadows and floodplain forest. The 20th-century river regulation cut that meandering course off from the main flow, but the water didn't disappear: the old channel survived as Stará Dyje, a separate, gently looping arm. The result is one of the quietest and most atmospheric corners of the Lednice–Valtice estate — not a grand castle vista, but a soft green corridor of slow water and alder and willow, where the river looks much as it did before engineers moved in.
