Praha Zoo today opened a wooden lookout tower

Prague - The Prague zoo today opened a new lookout tower for visitors. The entirely wooden tower is 18.5 meters tall and has 85 steps. It cost four million crowns and will be accessible to visitors for free in nice weather, said the zoo director Petr Fejk during the ceremonial opening of the tower today.
    "We have wished for this lookout tower for a long time, because the area of the Prague zoo offers incredibly beautiful views of the capital city, the Vltava riverbed from this place, which is the highest point of our area called Obora. It offers a beautiful view of Prague Castle, of Prague 8, 7, and 6," Fejk described the view. "The flood delayed our plans. Now we have found the strength for it, the garden is repaired, so we can afford such tourist treats," he added.
    The first wooden lookout tower in Prague is an exact copy of the lookout from Mount Smrk in the Jizera Mountains, which was built in 1892 and stood there for about 60 years. In the 1950s, it was demolished because it was no longer maintained during the war and fell into disrepair.
    "We held a kind of celebration, a revival of Czech tourism and the period when these lookout towers, various excursion steamers, and inns were created and when the idea of Czech tourism was at its peak," he said. The ceremonial opening of the lookout tower was also attended by film director Jiří Strach, musician Michal Hrůza, representatives of the Club of Friends of Lookout Towers, and the New Town under Smrk, where the lookout tower once stood. Today, a new lookout tower with a metal structure stands there.
    "It's quite an adventurous ascent; as it's really a hundred-year-old structure, there's no elevator, nothing comfortable," Fejk described the relatively steep and demanding climb. Strach did not enjoy the lookout much, as he descended as one of the first.
    Obora is the highest point of the garden right next to the bison exhibit, and visitors can get there along the Indonesian jungle pavilion and the upper station of the cable car. "Right down there is a refreshment area, so part of the family that doesn't want to go up can have a snack and wait for the braver ones to wave at them from above," added the zoo director.
    The chairman of the Club of Friends of Lookout Towers, Martin Špád, revealed to the attending children and parents that there are about 250 to 270 lookout towers in the Czech Republic. The new lookout tower is already the sixth in Prague - after the Petrin lookout, the Žižkov Tower, Cibulka, the now-inaccessible lookout in the House of Children and Youth in Modřany, and two identical lookout towers on the Lahovice Bridge. The Olomouc zoo also has its own lookout tower, but with a steel structure.