Day trips around Trnava: Milan Bez Mapy’s tips

The area around Trnava surprised me, and you can reach most places without a car, by train and in summer by free shuttle bus. Don’t miss the Terra Parna winery in Suchá nad Parnou, the English park of the manor house in Voderady and the rose garden in Dolná Krupá. In Trnava itself, stop by the Saturday market on the square.

Quick factsby Milan Bez Mapy

Getting around without a car

Trains go to Trnava and Smolenice, and in summer free shuttle buses run, for example to Dolná Krupá

Where I stayed

Apartments 1620yr in the centre of Trnava, a great base for trains and shuttles

Terra Parna

I booked my tasting in advance; dinners in the vineyard sell out months ahead

Medolandia entry

About €4.50–5 in season, free off-season; the roses bloom in summer

Trnava tour

Guided tours of the centre with a guide in period costume are free

What I liked most

The market on the square on Friday and Saturday mornings, it's not just about food but about community

Looking for day trips around Trnava? I went there at the invitation of Región Trnava, the regional tourism organisation, and thought I knew the answer before I arrived: a few churches, the old town, maybe a market on the square. Instead, I ended up at a winery where people wait months for a dinner table, in an English park with Chinese pagodas and an artificial cave, and in a garden where six thousand rose varieties once grew.

How to get to Trnava and around without a car

Trnava itself is easy to reach by train, and so is Smolenice. For most of the places I describe here you don’t need a car at all: in summer there’s a free shuttle bus between Trnava and Dolná Krupá, another one runs from the train station past the cave all the way to Smolenice, and the newest line runs Cífer – train station – Voderady.

Tip from Milan You can compare flights from London to Bratislava on Omio, and if you’d rather explore the region by car, I compare rental cars on Discover Cars.

Where I slept and had breakfast in Trnava

I stayed at Apartments 1620yr right in the centre of Trnava, which turned out to be a great base for combining trains and shuttle buses. In the past I also stayed right in the manor house in Voderady, so if you’d rather sleep closer to the park than to the town, that’s an option too. I had breakfast at Synagóga Café, a short walk from the centre, before setting off to explore the town. Here are my tips for trips around Trnava.

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My tips for trips around Trnava

Terra Parna winery in Suchá nad Parnou

My first stop was, as is tradition by now, a tasting at the Terra Parna winery in Ružová dolina near Suchá nad Parnou. Jožo, the father, planted the vineyard in 2003, made his first wine in 2006 and 2007, and the winery building got its final approval in 2008. Today two of his three daughters run it: one studied viticulture and leads the tastings, the other studied Luxury Branding & Fashion in Grenoble. Together they have almost 8 hectares; the Mladá hora vineyard was planted in 2014.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived was a little tower with a cross that anyone would take for a chapel. It isn’t one. It’s a water reservoir, built long ago by a monk, back when the land belonged to a religious order that had its summer residence here.

In the 1930s, the well-off gentlemen of Trnava built summer villas here. According to one of the neighbours, that was because Trnava had no sewers back then and the town stank in summer. Locals worked their vineyards, and there were three wine taverns and a café called U Viežličiek.

• Tip from Milan Also read my article with tips on where to go wine tasting in Trnava.

The main variety is Blauer Portugieser (Modrý Portugal in Slovak), which the father chose by asking the local grandmothers what grows well here. Under socialism the vines were overcropped and the wine came out watery. That’s where its bad reputation comes from, and it has stuck to this day, even though the variety itself has nothing to do with it. By the way, genetic tests found no match with any Portuguese variety. The only trace leads to an Austrian prince from Bad Vöslau, who was supposedly sent cuttings by Portuguese growers.

At the tasting I also learned something I didn’t expect: an old Riesling can smell of petrol or mothballs. It’s caused by a compound that forms in the grapes under strong sun. Some vintages, on the other hand, were shaped by ladybirds that didn’t get separated from the grapes at harvest and gave the wine a typical bitterness. Something most people have no idea about caught my attention too: their sparkling wine goes through its second fermentation right in the bottle, while ordinary prosecco ferments a second time in a large pressurised tank. That’s a fundamental difference in how the bubbles are made.

The winery also knows the difference between real and fake barrique. An oak barrel for €500 or more gives the wine micro-oxygenation and smooths the tannins, while oak chips in a stainless steel tank are just a cheap substitute. The harvest is done entirely by hand, and they built the winery right in the vineyard so the grapes don’t have to travel anywhere and oxidise. The 2025 Sauvignon came out remarkably aromatic because they cooled the grapes in a refrigerated truck during the harvest.

What fascinated me most was their ice harvest of Alibernet. They leave the grapes hanging until the first frost below minus seven degrees, when they have around 300 grams of sugar. In one rainy year their whole crop rotted, and some of the last bottles they managed to save even made it to Michelin-starred restaurants in England. By the way, local winemakers don’t see the neighbour a few vineyards away as their competition. Their competition is foreign wine on restaurant lists and bottles pretending to be Slovak, even though they’re filled from a tanker brought in from somewhere in the south.

It reminded me a little of the Valle de Uco wine region in Mendoza, Argentina, where they make Malbec, only the version here is less mass-produced. And I like how close together everything is here, unlike Mendoza, where it’s a long drive from one winery to the next.

• Tip from Milan I booked my tasting in advance, which turned out to be a smart move: dinners in the vineyard sell out months ahead. I’d also recommend their legendary Christmas brunches.

Golf Trnava and footgolf with Terra Parna wine

Another stop on the trip is Golf Trnava, a course on the left past the Kamenný Mlyn recreation area, on the road towards Biely Kostol. I tried hitting balls on the practice range, both covered and outdoor. What surprised me most was something they’d added only a few weeks earlier: a radar system that records every shot, its trajectory, distance, height and ball speed, and you can follow it all on your phone or a tablet right there.

For kids there’s an artificial putting green and a new entrance gate, and the grounds are mowed by a robotic mower that has no problem driving into the water. The bar menu borrows its names from golf scoring; the Birdie burger, which is a chili burger, is a typical example. They also serve Terra Parna wines: Grüner Veltliner, Sauvignon Blanc, the red Blauer Portugieser and Prosecco, including an alcohol-free one. They used to have a different brand and are just switching to this winery.

Trnava is more of a football town, it belongs to Spartak, and footgolf is seen here a bit as a „marketing“ sport, even though Slovakia has a women’s footgolf world champion.

The English park of the manor house in Voderady

Later I moved on to the park by the manor house in Voderady. In 1794 the Zichy counts had it converted from a French garden into an English one, a so-called sentimental park meant to make visitors feel mystery and desolation. It really is the first park of its kind in Slovakia, designed by the German garden architect Bernhard Petri, who was only 24 at the time.

Its typical features are a fake knight’s ruin, an artificial cave, an obelisk with a Latin inscription in Petri’s honour, and Chinese pagodas added by a later owner, Jozef Zichy, a great traveller. He visited Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, southern India by sea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, China and Mongolia, returned via Russia, and brought what he saw straight into the architecture of the park.

The lakes used to be fed by gravity through a millrace from the mill channel of the Gidra stream. Today the natural inflow has dried up and a pump keeps the water moving. You could even swim in them, there were changing rooms, and the island could only be reached by boat. We tried that completely spontaneously, without planning it.

By the lake stands a restored water tower, the so-called hermitage, which once housed a pump for irrigation. It was reconstructed using 3D printing, which is still quite a rarity in Slovakia. Under socialism there was an agricultural school here, along with a henhouse and stables, and after the revolution a private owner built a house right into the fake ruin, with windows and blinds. For the past two or three years the Bohdal family has been restoring the park intensively, a nice contrast to nearby Dolná Krupá, where the park is in state hands and the restoration drags on because of bureaucracy.

• Tip from Milan In summer they host barbecues right on the manor house terrace, which you can book online, and at Christmas there’s usually a tasting dinner. I tried the summer barbecue and it was food on a seriously high level.

Medolandia and the countess’s rose garden in Dolná Krupá, a must on any trip around Trnava

Medolandia is the visitor area of the Apimed meadery in Dolná Krupá. In 2016 they bought the land, the ruined remains of the counts‘ old distillery with only the chimney still standing, and turned 14 collapsed buildings into a rose garden with 2,500 rose bushes and 250 varieties.

The garden is dedicated to Countess Marie Henriette Chotek, the last resident of the local manor house. She started building the rosarium here at the beginning of the 20th century, and it really was one of the largest in Europe: according to a 1926 catalogue it had 5,000 varieties, and three years later 6,000. She collected an almost complete range of old roses and even bred some of them herself.

The rosarium faded away gradually during the economic crisis of the 1930s, and the countess died in 1946, right here in Dolná Krupá. After the war the estate passed to the state, the land was divided into plots and today there are houses on it. The manor house belongs to the Slovak National Museum.

The manor house in Dolná Krupá and Beethoven

The Brunsvik family built the manor house in its current form in 1822; one of the Brunsvik daughters married a Chotek, hence the change of name. Beethoven came here to teach the Brunsvik daughters piano, which is why Dolná Krupá is called the village of music and roses, and the park has a music flower bed with roses dedicated to Vivaldi, Puccini and Strauss.

On the tour I also learned exactly how roses are pruned. You cut off only the faded flower, just above the first leaf with five leaflets. A few millimetres higher and the leaf turns black; lower and no new shoot grows. Pruned like this, they bloom from June to September or October. For mead it’s the other way round: they cut the most beautiful flowers, pick the petals by hand and soak them for weeks in a mead named after the countess. That’s why I think this place belongs on every list of trips around Trnava.

The mead here is made by the Kudlač family. They say that until 2004 there were no single-varietal meads anywhere in the world, only herbal or spiced ones, until Mr Kudlač applied the logic of wine to honey. All the honey is Slovak, from about 150 contracted beekeepers. Before buying their honey, they visit each of them in person and have samples tested in a lab. The rarest is forest honey: it doesn’t come every year and only in certain areas. Chestnut honey is one of the best, but there’s too little of it to buy by the tonne, the way they buy the others.

• Tip from Milan Entry to the grounds costs about €4.50–5 in season and is free off-season. Rose season is in summer; mead and gingerbread season is in winter.

Trnava, the town they call Little Rome

On the second day I joined a guided tour of the centre with a local guide in period costume. The tours are free. Región Trnava, the regional tourism organisation (officially Trnava Tourism), organises them with support from the Slovak Ministry of Tourism and Sport. Within its walls Trnava has 8 churches and 2 synagogues, which for a town of its size is one of the highest densities of religious monuments in Slovakia.

The nickname Little Rome is usually put down to those churches, but the real reason is different. When the Turks took Esztergom, the seat of the Archbishop of Esztergom, in 1543, the archbishop and the whole chapter moved to Trnava temporarily. That temporary solution lasted almost 300 years; the archdiocese only returned to Esztergom in 1820. During those three centuries, five of the eight churches that stand in the town today were built.

St Nicholas Basilica

The most important one is St Nicholas Basilica, built at the turn of the 14th and 15th centuries on the site of an older Romanesque church. Its construction was funded partly by the kings Louis I the Great, Sigismund of Luxembourg and Albert of Habsburg. It became a temporary cathedral and the most important building of the Kingdom of Hungary at the time. Next to it, the former Renaissance archbishop’s palace is still falling apart. It has been empty for about ten years, and part of the staircase is closed for safety reasons. Here are my tips on what to see in Trnava.

Inside the basilica there’s a crypt where archbishops are buried and one of the oldest organs in town, still working. On the main altar hangs a miraculous 13th-century painting of the Virgin Mary. According to accounts from the time, bloody tears appeared on it in 1663 and 1708, during the Turkish raids and during the Kuruc uprising, and legend has it the town escaped disaster both times.

In 1710, during the plague, the town promised an annual offering if the Virgin Mary protected it. The agreement has reportedly survived to this day as a document, and nobody in the town died back then.

The Saturday market on the square in Trnava

Trnava has its own tradition beyond the monuments too: on Friday and Saturday mornings there’s a market on the square, and in the end that’s what I liked most of all. It’s not just about food. It’s a place where community is built, along with what people call genius loci. People here know each other and stop for a chat, and that suits a town like Trnava perfectly.

Región Trnava’s activities are carried out with financial support from the Slovak Ministry of Tourism and Sport.

Happy travels!