After years of efforts, the gardens of the Tugendhat and Löw-Beer villas will be connected for visitors in Brno.

Brno - After several years of efforts, the gardens of the two Brno villas Tugendhat and Löw-Beer will be connected for visitors starting next year on April 1. The Museum of the City of Brno, which manages the first of these villas, also plans additional visiting options for this monument, for which tickets for interior tours have long been sold out. Therefore, next year new tour circuits will be created, including Saturday mornings designed for families with children, where the explanation will be adapted. Five exhibitions will open at Špilberk Castle next year, said Zbyněk Šolc, the director of the Museum of the City of Brno, at a press conference today.

This year, 52,000 people visited Villa Tugendhat, which is 11 percent more than three years ago before the pandemic. "More really can’t fit in here," Šolc stated. That is why more visitors should be able to access the garden tours of both neighboring villas. "They will at least peek inside from the outside, receive all the information as they would inside, and the capacity of this tour is more or less unlimited," Šolc said.

Since the beginning of the year, Špilberk Castle has seen half a million visitors by Thursday, with 130,000 people having purchased a ticket, and thousands more attending concerts held in the area. "Even though people have to walk up the hill to the castle, we have many visitors here," said Šolc. And for those who wanted to view the castle as a building in the past, the museum will offer the opportunity to purchase a ticket for a new tour of the most interesting places in the castle starting April 1. "These will include places that have never been part of the historical interpretation of the castle. The tour will last 55 minutes," said Šolc.

Later this year, on October 26, a new exhibition will open at Špilberk, with five more planned for next year. "It's an exhibition Faces from Oblivion. This is an absolutely amazing exhibition of photographs we found in the attic of the house at Vlhká 19. They were boxes of glass negatives without any labels. The house was inhabited by either Jews who died during the war or Germans who were displaced after the war," Šolc described.

Exhibitions planned for next year include Brno Green, focusing on the history of forests and forestry in Brno, and an exhibition commemorating the founding of the monastery in Old Brno, marking 700 years since Eliška Rejčka. Another exhibition, The World through Miloš Budík's Lens, will showcase photographs by the still-living pioneer of Czech photography. Another exhibition will be The Second Face of Brno, about German artists from Brno during the First Republic, and the last will be titled František Navrátil, featuring busts of Brno personalities.

"We are already preparing for the years 2024 and 2025. In two years, we will display vedutas and old photographs in an exhibition titled Nostalgic Brno. The following year we will return to the anniversary of 1645 when Brno defended itself against the Swedes during the Thirty Years' War," Šolc said.

Starting December 1, a new option will be that tickets can be purchased online at the Brno iD website, where it is already possible to buy tickets for the observatory and the zoo.