South Moravia

Photographers call South Moravia the Moravian Tuscany, and the comparison fits better than you would expect. The name had been going round among them for a while, but it was Emil Čelustka, a native of nearby Kyjov, who spread it — he founded a website under that name in 2016 and set about promoting the landscape. Vineyards, hills of ploughed field, copses along the ridges — a landscape that rolls and changes colour with whatever is growing on it. It is no wonder it is among the most photographed places in the country.

Flower strips near Šardice in spring

Those coloured bands cutting the fields into ribbons are not an accident. They are biobelts — strips six to twenty-four metres wide, sown inside a field or along its edge with a mix of flowering plants. Some are there to feed pollinators, others to give birds and small game food and cover through the winter.

Studies find far more farmland birds and hares in them than in the land around. They cover a fraction of a percent of arable land, so when you come across one it is worth stopping.

Flower strips in summer, and the glamping

Tucked in among the orchards there is a glamping site. I had the chance to spend a summer weekend there and it was a lovely one — you sleep under canvas a few steps from the rows of trees, and in the morning you walk straight out into the landscape you otherwise only know from photographs.

Čejkovice in spring

The Čejkovice cherry tree stands alone in the middle of a vineyard, and for a few days a year it is the queen of the whole slope. It blossoms before the vines have leafed out, which makes it the only white thing on the hillside. Photographers come to it from across the country and from abroad.

Čejkovice in autumn

In autumn the same slope is unrecognisable. The tree disappears among rows that turn yellow and red, and the vineyard takes the lead.

The South Moravian landscape