Court Gardens

The Hofgarten – the Court Garden of the Würzburg Residenz – is a unique testimony to Baroque garden design. Indeed, both the building and its gardens were inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1981. The Hofgarten was laid out in the late 18th century, once the work on the prince-bishops’ new seat of government in the heart of the city had been completed. The prominent landscape gardener Johann Prokop Mayer was commissioned to supervise this great project. The land behind the Residence was not easy to deal with, as there is a steep rise eastwards towards the massive retaining walls of the Baroque city defences, which even today mark the boundary of the area. Yet Mayer pulled off this complicated task by cleverly dividing the grounds up into separate, self-contained sections. The Hofgarten as a whole thus consists of three parts that are roughly equal in size...