The largest and most famous safari park in the Czech Republic is of course the one in Dvůr Králové. Its uniqueness lies not only in its size and interesting past, but above all in the number of living animals and its success in the field of breeding, where it has achieved worldwide importance. The whole safari park began its existence as a small corner for animals in the garden of the old, so-called Neumann Villa. The original villa of Doctor Richard Neumann, confiscated by the Nazis as part of the appropriation of Jewish property, was nationalized after the end of World War II and became the seat of the Dvůr Králové Museum. In 1946, Otakar Štěpánek, the former director of the Prague Zoo, founded a small zoo with only a few species of animals in its park, which was then almost five hectares in size. The garden gradually grew to include new species, acquired a name and modernised. By the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, it had a total of 28 hectares and among the animals were the first exotic species such as Bengal tigers. However, the main transformation of the garden into the safari park as we know it today came in 1965 with the director Josef Vágner, a passionate zoologist and Africanist, who gave the garden a completely new character. Wagner was an outstanding expert on African animals and a successful animal breeder. He managed to dedicate the garden to African fauna and during his expeditions to Africa he brought back three thousand animals, which formed the basis of the zoo`s future animal husbandry. The most important has become the breeding of giraffes, of which 250 have been born here during the existence of the park, the highest number in the world outside Africa. In the 1970s, the park had the largest herd of giraffes in the world. Thanks to him, today the Dvůr Králové Safari Park is the only park focused on African fauna in the Czech Republic and at the same time the only lion safari in Central Europe. Since the 1980s, the original Neumann Villa has also housed a unique collection of original paintings by the painter Zdeněk Burian.
