Horní Kounice: Holiday apartments and holiday homes

Horní Kounice combines historic buildings, the landscape of Rokytná Nature Park and a local competitive tradition centred around goulash cooked in a kettle.

Culture and history

The Hospitaller Commandery is considered the best-preserved example of a village commandery in Moravia and, together with the church, forms a significant historic landmark of the municipality. The Roman Catholic Church of Saint Michael the Archangel is a late Baroque building dating from 1785–1790, with a Romanesque core from the mid-13th century. The vicarage on the square in Horní Kounice also dates from 1780 and is considered architecturally valuable.

The former Hospitaller Commandery was initially converted into a Gothic fortress and later into a granary. In the southern wing of the opposite courtyard, a cellar measuring 17.7 × 5 metres has been preserved; it contains the lower part of an early Gothic residential building of the Hospitaller Commandery and is accessible via an early Gothic pointed-arch portal from a staircase leading to the courtyard.

The historic surroundings also include the Alinkov farmstead, a late Renaissance complex built around 1600 with the remains of a mill. It lies on the right bank of the Rokytná north of Čermákovice, but already within the cadastral area of Horní Kounice.

Rokytná natural area

Rokytná Nature Park combines river landscapes shaped by meanders, rocks, floodplain meadows, scree habitats and changing forest types such as spruce, oak-hornbeam and pine forests. The nature park also includes Horní Kounice; the protected landscape around the Rokytná belongs to the European Natura 2000 sites. Kingfishers, crayfish, otters and eagle owls can be spotted in the nature park.

Local tradition and transport links

Gulášfest is a traditional competition in Horní Kounice for the best goulash cooked in a kettle. At the fourth edition of Gulášfest, tasting and judging of the kettle goulash were part of the programme.

Horní Kounice can be reached by car or bus, lies on the Moravský Krumlov–Tavíkovice route and is integrated into the IDS JMK transport system.

Other places at the same higher administrative level are Dobřínsko, Dyje, Hostim, Valtrovice, Mikulovice, Uhercice U Znojma, Prosiměřice and Suchohrdly.

For the higher-level travel overview: Okres Znojmo.