Select your most popular castle, most romantic park or most impressive garden in Germany.

Select your most popular castle, most romantic park or most impressive garden in Germany.

Our suggestions: Please select ... Anholt moated castle, Isselburg-Anholt Arolsen Palace Augustusburg Palace & Falkenlust hunting lodge, Brühl/Bonn Bayreuth Benrath Palace & Park, Düsseldorf Blankenburg Castle & Garden Botanical gardens, Berlin-Dahlem Bremen Bürgerpark Brühl Terrace, Dresden Burghausen Castle Bückeburg Palace Celle Palace Charlottenburg Palace Chinese House Clemenswerth Hunting Lodge & Park, Sögel Corvey Palace, Höxter Dyck Palace, Jüchen egapark Erfurt Eltz Castle English Garden, Munich European Rosarium, Sangerhausen Eutin Castle Fasanerie Palace Flower Island of Mainau Friedenstein Palace, Gotha Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz Garden of the Senses, Merzig Glienicke Palace & Park, Berlin-Zehlendorf Gottorf Palace Granitz Hunting Lodge, Rügen Island Greiz Summer Palace Grosssedlitz baroque gardens, Heidenau Hambach Castle, Neustadt an der Weinstrasse Heidecksburg Palace, Rudolstadt Heidelberg Castle Herrenchiemsee Palace Hohenzollern Castle, Zimmern Hundisburg Palace Hämelschenburg Castle, Emmerthal Imperial Palace, Goslar Kaiserburg Castle, Nuremberg Königstein Fortress Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord Linderhof Palace, Oberammergau Ludwigsburg Palace Ludwigslust Palace Marienburg Castle Marksburg Castle Moritzburg Palace/Fasanenschlösschen Neuschwanstein Castle, Hohenschwangau Neuzelle Abbey Garden New Palace, Bamberg New Palace, Potsdam Nordkirchen Palace Nymphenburg Palace & Park, Munich Palmengarten botanical gardens, Frankfurt am Main Pillnitz Palace and park Planten un Blomen Park, Hamburg Prince Pückler Park, Bad Muskau and Branitz Rheinsberg Palace Royal Herrenhausen Gardens, Hannover Sanssouci Palace & Park, Potsdam Schwerin Castle & Park Schwetzingen Palace Schönbusch Park, Aschaffenburg Solitude Palace, Stuttgart St. Emmeram Palace, Regensburg Stolzenfels Castle The Gardens of Kleve (Cleves) Villeroy & Boch Abbey Garden, Mettlach Wartburg Castle, Eisenach Weikersheim Palace Weimar Palace & Ilm Park Wernigerode Castle Wilhelmshöhe Palace & Park, Kassel Würzburg Residenz Palace Zwinger Palace, Dresden “Favorite”Palace, Rastatt

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Neuschwanstein is known all over the world as a symbol of idealised romantic architecture and the tragic tale of its lord. After Ludwig II's sovereignty was taken away, he withdrew into his own world of myths, legend and fairytales on a rugged mountain peak by the Pöllat gorge. He had already felt the lure of the Middle Ages as a child prince growing up in medieval Hohenschwangau Castle. When Ludwig II started construction of Neuschwanstein in 1869, he united aspects of the Wartburg, a quintessentially German castle that had only been restored a year before, with those described in the Castle of the Holy Grail from Wagner's “Parsifal”. Neuschwanstein Castle, which was only given this name after Ludwig II's death, unashamedly harks back to the German Romanesque of the 13th century. Indeed the southern wing was only completed in 1891, five years after the king's mysterious death at Lake Starnberg.
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A trip to Italy provided the inspiration for what is now Kassel's première visitor attraction. As soon as Landgrave Karl von Hessen-Kassel set eyes upon the monumental statue of Hercules in Rome, he was smitten. The task of turning the Landgrave's dream into reality fell to an architect from Rome called Giovanni Francesco Guerniero, who created a masterpiece of nature and architecture in the Habichtswald hills between 1701 and 1711. Towering atop a steep 527-metre peak is the Octagonal Palace with the famous Hercules at its very tip. From here, water gushes down a magnificent cascade, passing plateaus and grottos before emptying into the “Neptune basin”. In 1785 Elector Wilhelm I set about transforming the surrounding scenery into the wild and romantic upland forest park we see today, with its water features, embankments and bridges. Wilhelmshöhe Palace, to which he lent his name, is today a museum with an impressive collection of Old Masters.
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In the 17th century, King Louis XIV of France presided over the most extravagant court in Europe, and the Palace of Versailles provided the inspiration for many other residences of the European nobility. His most fervent admirer was Ludwig II of Bavaria, who saw the sovereign as the ideal embodiment of the monarchy. In 1873, he was able to buy idyllic Herrenwörth island in Lake Chiemsee, the perfect place to not only copy the luxurious palace of his French namesake, but to better it. Its isolated location perfectly suited his melancholy nature and craving for solitude. The interior of the “New Palace” is impressive for its staircase, bedroom and intimate apartment in a charming French rococo style. The crowning glory however is the huge Hall of Mirrors, which is an almost perfect copy of the original “Galerie des Glaces” in Versailles.
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Of the three palaces that Ludwig II actually had built, Linderhof Palace is the most inspired. He loved the seclusion of its location in the Graswang valley, where his father, Maximilian II, had the “Königshäuschen” built. In 1874, this wooden hunting lodge was extended by a U-shaped wing and converted into a royal mansion. With Linderhof Palace, the other-worldly, hypersensitive king created a splendid building complex with an exterior that copied the royal French palace architecture of the 18th century. The interior is furnished in a magnificent “second rococo” style, with an opulently decorated, playful décor, the aristocratic way of expressing sophisticated living. Linderhof Palace was the king's only project to be completed in his lifetime and he stayed here more often than at his other two fairytale refuges.
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The longest castle in Europe (1,043 metres) and one of Germany's largest, it perches high above the small baroque town of Burghausen in Upper Bavaria on the Austrian border, just like in a fairytale. Its many towers have seen more than a thousand years of history. This monument to late-medieval fortress architecture is laid out like a vast picture spread. The castle's present appearance with its fortified towers, walls which are five metres thick in places, outer wards, keep, ditches, banqueting halls and drawbridges dates from the 13th to 15th centuries. It also has dark chapters in its history, as evidenced by the witches' tower and torture tower (now a museum), the "Spinnhäusl" for female prisoners and the Prechtl Tower, in which the executioner lived in the 18th century.
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Fortified with a multitude of towers and turrets, Hohenzollern Castle sits in splendour almost 900 metres above the Swabian Alb. Even though it might look it, this fortress straight from the pages of a storybook is not from the Middle Ages. After seeing the crumbling walls of his forefathers' castle, the Prussian Crown Prince decided to have it reconstructed in 1819. Friedrich August Stüler, a leading architect from Berlin who had studied under the great Karl Friedrich Schinkel, was commissioned to oversee the project. He sought inspiration from medieval architecture in France and England, where Gothic Revival style (neo-Gothic) was very much in vogue. The castle represented a symbol of the Hohenzollern family's claim to power, Some evidence of the Middle Ages remains: parts of St. Michael's Chapel have been retained from the original in 1461, and cellars and casemates from the previous castles were revealed in 2001.
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A stroll in the park at Schwetzingen Palace reveals a wealth of surprises: gems such as a mosque with Moorish-style domes, a picturesque mock ruin, a bath house featuring marble and a splendid Apollo temple. The arts-loving Elector Palatine Carl Theodor extended and transformed his ancestors' hunting castle into a luxurious summer residence, a "mini Versailles" in the Palatinate. The most striking architectural feature here – and the only example in Europe – is the Zirkel: two single-storey, semi-circular buildings added to the palace on either side. The northern section of the Zirkel contains a charming, rococo-style, 500-seat theatre, built for the Elector as a promoter of the arts. Even as distinguished a guest as Voltaire, the French writer and philosopher, was impressed by the beauty of Schwetzingen's illusory surroundings.
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Electress Sophie von Hannover was the mastermind behind these splendid gardens. She had the country estate and summer retreat of Herrenhausen laid out in the style of the impressive baroque gardens created by the House of Orange. At its heart is the Grosser Garten, a park resembling a vast outdoor banqueting hall, where snow-white sandstone sculptures add gravitas to the ordered nature. Herrenhausen is also home to Germany's first garden theatre: with its gilded figures, it is as spectacular a setting today as it was in Electress Sophie's day. The gardens were Sophie's great passion and Herrenhausen became a vibrant rendezvous for prominent figures in European cultural affairs. They have also preserved the history of the Guelph dynasty and illustrate the diversity of European horticulture.
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The Bavarian elector Ferdinand was so delighted at the birth of a much longed-for heir to his throne that he gave his wife a piece of land. That was in 1663, and the Wittelsbach Electress Henriette Adelaide von Savoyen built herself a “borgo de la ninfe”, a small summer villa with a garden. This was the predecessor of Nymphenburg Palace. At the start of the 18th century the building was extended on both sides, with residential pavilions connected by galleries being added. The exterior was remodelled in the French style and the modest palace transformed into a large, elegant summer residence. Nymphenburg is regarded as a European masterpiece, combining architecture and landscape design in seldom-seen harmony. At the beginning of the 19th century the leading landscape gardener Friedrich Ludwig Sckell transformed the margins of the park into an English landscaped garden with meandering paths and picturesque effects.
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The Palmengarten botanical gardens with their famous 'glass palace' were founded by a group of innovative citizens in the 19th century. The gardens are a green oasis in the heart of the city and a popular destination for locals and visitors alike. In the gardens you can see almost every example of exotic flora growing around the world. The Tropicarium, an ensemble of 14 greenhouses featuring modern glass architecture, houses a wealth of tropical and subtropical species. The world's various climatic zones are perfectly simulated here, from the lush green rainforests and monsoon forests to the sultry mangroves and dry desert with giant prickly cacti. The pièce de résistance is the 18-metre-high palm house, the oldest and most famous building in the gardens. The iron structure was designed by architect Friedrich Kaysser and built between 1868 and 1869. The gardens created by a group of citizens were opened in 1871 and the city took control of the 21-hectare site in 1931. “Botany for everyone” has been the theme of hundreds of guided tours and lectures here ever since.
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