Natolin: The Romantic Palace and Forest Park in South Warsaw

From royal menagerie to Romantic park

At the end of the 17th century the Natolin forest was King Jan III Sobieski's menagerie and part of the Wilanow estate; under Augustus II it became a pheasantry, the City of Warsaw recounts. In 1780 Prince August Czartoryski created a rustic summer residence here and built a classicist palace on the Vistula escarpment overlooking the forest below. The estate passed to his granddaughter Aleksandra of the Potocki family, and when her granddaughter Natalia was born in 1807, the residence was named Natolin in her honour. Around that time the forest was reshaped into a fashionable Romantic landscape park.

What survives

Per the city, the historic composition still shows the main visual axis linking the palace and the Moorish gate, the circuit avenue and the park structures: the Doric temple (a garden pavilion), an aqueduct, the Moorish bridge and the mausoleum of Natalia, who died young. The ensemble was entered in the register of monuments in July 1965 under number 647 and lies within the Wilanow Cultural Park.

A forest left alone

Left largely untended for nearly two centuries, the lower park grew into a natural forest whose biodiversity the city compares to the Bialowieza Primeval Forest - an oddity at least on the European scale. In 1991 part of the park became the Las Natolinski nature reserve. The upper park covers 20 hectares around the palace; the lower park, 17 metres below, spreads over more than 100 hectares.

Visiting

Since 1994 the ensemble has been administered by the Natolin European Centre Foundation, which adapted the palace buildings for the College of Europe, an international university. The grounds are not a public park in the everyday sense: per the city, the beauty of the place can be admired in organised groups with a guide.