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The park, covering 20,000 square metres of forests, meadows and lakes, features buildings and colourful monumental sculptures of mythic beasts — including dragons, snakes, birdmen and unicorns — designed in what has been described as the “fantastic realist” style — Ludwig II of Bavaria meets Tolkein’s Middle Earth, or possibly Antoni Gaudi on acid.

Weber, who started work on the project in 1962, envisaged his park as a “visionary counterworld” to the “concrete deserts” of the industrial urban landscape. Inspired by eastern mythology and European folk tales as well as by his own fertile imagination, he used tile, mosaic, concrete, and stone, glass and steel to stock his park with a profusion of sinister, comic and melancholic biomorphic creatures and swirling monumental forms.

In the middle, he built himself a phantasmagorical house, its facade a writhing profusion of Gothic gargoyles, balcony railings in the form of dragons and well-endowed nymphs frolicking with unicorns, serpents and satyrs — the whole topped by a 25-metre-high tower. Inside, the house featured a dining room with a mosaic labyrinth floor and, for a fireplace, a monster with heat emanating from its nostrils.

Weber took little notice of planning or building regulations and in consequence got into difficulties with the authorities. But his park became so popular with visitors that a truce was eventually agreed. Indeed, in recent years, Weber received a state grant worth millions to help him to create a water garden – on which he was still working at the time of his death.

Bruno Weber was born on April 10 1931 in Dietikon, Switzerland, and grew up in a large Baroque house which, he recalled, had “many mysterious rooms [which] had never really been explored”. The experience, he said, made a lasting impression on his imagination.

After studying at the Zurich College of Arts and Crafts, Weber began training as a lithographer, and in 1950 made study trips to Rome, Greece and Czechoslovakia.

He began his career as a painter in oils, developing a fantasy style influenced by Cezanne and the Swiss artist Max Gubler. Later, as well as developing his sculpture park, he worked extensively with the Swiss architects Justus Dahinden and Peter Vetsch, designing sculptures for the facades of buildings.

Bruno Weber is survived by his wife, Mariann Godon, and by their twin daughters.

Bruno Weber, born April 10 1931, died October 24 2011