Stromovka

Stromovka is the largest park in Budějovice, sixty-eight hectares of greenery twenty minutes’ walk from the centre, with Lake Bagr in the middle — a lake that was in no plan. It made itself there, and people named it before the authorities could agree on one.

People come for a whole afternoon rather than a short stroll. Walking the park including Bagr takes an hour and a half; the paths are flat and suit bikes, prams and inline skates. There is an eighteen-hole disc golf course that is free to play — the route is two kilometres, but players say bad throws mean you really walk about four. In autumn 2025 a concrete skatepark with a basketball court and a grilling area was added.

People do not swim in Bagr. When the town drained and cleaned it in 2024, it found thirteen species of fish and a seven-kilo catfish, and deputy mayor Zuzana Kudláčková said clearly then: “It will never work as a swimming pool. It is a relaxation zone.”

The lake that made itself

Pre-war town maps show no water body on Dlouhá louka — only a damp patch near the raised channel of Zlatá stoka. After the war gravel was quarried here, and when dredging stopped deep pits quickly filled with groundwater and rain. Before 1955 a continuous sheet of about three hectares and up to five metres deep had formed. It is not a fishpond — it was not made by damming a stream, but by a digger’s hole. The town later folded it into the plan to improve Stromovka simply because it was already there.

Where the name came from

For a long time the lake had no name of its own; documents called it only a “little lake”. People remembered the hard dredging that went on there — they said “at the digger” (na bagru), and in time that shortened to Bagr. Officials resisted for a while: they wrote “so-called bagr”, then “bagr” with a small b, until they gave in and accepted Bagr as the official name. It is one of the rare cases where a folk nickname beat the office. Today the magistrát lists Bagr at 2.6 hectares of water and an island of just under 1,600 m².

The children’s railway with a tunnel that left nothing

In September 1957 a pioneer railway began to be built in Stromovka, and on 27 June 1958 the chairman of the town national committee handed it to the transport company. The loop measured 3.8 kilometres, the train had a locomotive and ten carriages, and there was even a tunnel. Fares were one crown for children under ten and two for everyone else. Early enthusiasm gave way to neglect; maintenance stopped and in 1969 the town council ordered a complete dismantling. Today you would never know it had been there.

What was meant to be built instead

On 5 February 1948 the town council resolved to build a central sports stadium for defence training, the army and sports clubs on Dlouhá louka. The zoning plan added a riding track, an open-air gym, an archery ground, a zoo, a swimming pool — and a vegetative maze. Bagr and the children’s railway were not mentioned at all. In the end almost exactly what was not in the plan appeared, and almost nothing of what was.

The road that split the park

Under German occupation military units built a wartime road from Dlouhý most to the airport, paved with small setts poured with concrete. Locals called it the “motorway” for its surface and long straight stretches. That road split Dlouhá louka in two: the larger western part is now Stromovka; the name Dlouhá louka stayed only with the smaller eastern part. Along that axis today runs road I/3, the so-called left-bank road, European E 55. Cars that pass here still follow a line surveyed by the occupation army for the airport.

What really lives in the park

At founding, fast-growing short-lived trees were planted — Canadian poplar, crack and weeping willow, birch, alder. Only from the mid-1980s did the shift come to oaks, beeches, maples, lindens, pines and spruces — trees that will outlast the park’s fashion. Since 6 December 1992 Stromovka has been protected as a significant landscape element, and it shows: in 1997 nearly 300 species of fungi and over 400 nesting pairs of some fifty bird species were counted. For a park in the middle of a town, that is a lot.

On site

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