Fantazium: development of a minature (fairy garden) park

From 2007 we have been building and maintaining a small leasure park for the whole family, with some trails, puzzels, games and more, locally known as Houbový park (the Mushroom park).

(In 2020 we changed the name to Fantazium, as people kept asking for real mushrooms…)

In 2010 we added some houses and gnomes, at rather large sizes.

The houses and figures had a lot to endure in local weather conditions. Ongoing development and new insights lead to new ideas: Let’s make it smaller.

Being dutch has the advantage of having visited the dutch miniature park ‘Madurodam’ more than once, as a young kid as well as an adult. (https://www.madurodam.nl) Of course, there is no way we can ever get even close to that. Having said that; we are very inspired by the concept.

What if we could do a combination of our trails with some diorama type exhibitions connected together?

There are of course miniature parks all over europe. There are also a few minature parks in Czech Republic;

• Boheminium (https://www.boheminium.cz) in Mariánské Lázně, the fourth largest miniature park in Europe.
• In Bystřice nad Pernštejnem the artist Zdeněk Brachtl is building a complete valley with famous castles in a ‘Park Miniatur’.
• In Ostrava there is ‘Miniuni, The World of Miniatures’, with about 30 famous buildings and a train running in a garden sized area.
• Around the castle of Berchtold in Kunice some famous minature buildings are set.

There are also some small public garden railway sites by hobby enthousiasts that open in weekends and show more livelike landscapes.

But none of the above are in our area.

In most of the above parks you will find famous buildings in different levels of quality, in different scales, and mostly standing by themselves without any supporting figures or figurines to make them more ‘alive’.

So we aim for a more ‘Madurdam’- style garden, where it looks like everything is connected somehow, where little ‘people’ or fairytale figures could live.

And the main scale would be the same like Madurodam too; 1:25.

It took all of those parks years to build. We started in 2008 and are now reconstructing, but it will still take a few years before we will have something to even try to compete with the above.

Let’s just start and we’ll see.