The Botanical Splendour of the Baroque Hermitage Garden

A thicket of centuries-old trees, fountains carved in stone, water features and a nostalgic and fascinating orangery. To stroll around the perimeter of the Hermitage Park is to take a leap back in time to the golden age of 1715 when Margrave Georg Wilhelm had the old palace built near the residential town of Bayreuth as a pleasant place for the whole court. Later on, Princess Wilhelmine unleashed all her creativity by first of all enriching the royal residence with a music room and the Chinese mirror cabinet where she often retired to write her memoirs that later became famous, but above all she devoted herself to the aesthetics of the garden by entrusting the renovation project to Joseph St. Pierre. Thus the theatre of ruins and the lower grotto took shape, to which the new palace and the upper grotto, gardens of hedges, pergolas and groves would later be added. All sections, quite independent of each other, have been recreated over the past three decades and now the Hermitage has truly regained the botanical splendour it possessed during the 18th century.