The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in the World

16 places in 11 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Dolmabahçe Palace

   Turkey · 3.3 km from Istanbul41.039° N 29.002° E

   

   Dolmabahçe Palace lines the European shore of the Bosphorus in Istanbul, a long white facade of columns and carved stone reflected in the water. Its name means "filled-in garden": the site was once a bay where the Ottoman fleet anchored, reclaimed in the eighteenth century as an imperial garden. Sultan Abdülmecid I, finding the medieval Topkapı Palace too old-fashioned beside the courts of Europe, had it built between 1843 and 1853, to designs by Garabet Balyan and his son Nigoğayos of the Armenian Balyan family of court architects. The cost was enormous and strained the empire's finances, which slid towards default in 1875.

   Did you know? The palace holds 285 rooms, 46 halls, six hammams and 68 toilets, spread over roughly 45,000 square metres.

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2. 02 Lichtenstein Castle

   Schloss Lichtenstein

   Germany48.407° N 9.258° E

   

   Lichtenstein Castle stands on a narrow spur of rock high above the Echaz valley at the northern edge of the Swabian Jura, a slender Gothic Revival castle that looks as if it has grown out of the cliff. It is a 19th-century dream of the Middle Ages, and a book made it happen. In 1826 Wilhelm Hauff published Lichtenstein, a historical novel in the manner of Walter Scott in which the castle plays a central role; Count Wilhelm of Urach, a cousin of the King of Württemberg with a passion for medieval art and history, was so taken with it that in 1837 he bought the site, then occupied by a hunting lodge.

   Did you know? The name Lichtenstein means roughly "shining stone", a fitting label for a pale castle perched on a bare limestone crag.

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3. 03 Imperial City of Hue

   Vietnam · 0.2 km from Huế16.469° N 107.578° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   When Nguyễn Phúc Ánh unified Vietnam in 1802 and took the name Gia Long, he chose Huế, the old seat of his family, as the capital, and set about building a court on the model of Beijing's Forbidden City inside a European-style fortress. The result is three enclosures, one inside the other, on the north bank of the Perfume River. The outer citadel, a Vauban-style rampart nearly 10 km round with a moat, was begun in 1805 and finished in 1832 under Minh Mạng. Within it lies the Imperial City, a square about 600 m a side behind its own wall and moat, and within that again the Purple Forbidden City, reserved for the emperor and his household. Unlike Beijing, the whole complex faces southeast towards the river rather than due south, following the advice of geomancers.

   Did you know? On the night of 5 July 1885, after a failed attack on the French, Emperor Hàm Nghi was spirited out of the citadel to lead a guerrilla resistance.

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4. 04 Neuschwanstein Castle

   Schloss Neuschwanstein

   Germany47.557° N 10.749° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The name suggests a medieval stronghold; the building is closer to a 19th-century stage set with plumbing. Ludwig II commissioned it in 1868, right after the Austro-Prussian War had stripped Bavaria of real independence and left him a king with a crown but shrinking power — and what he built instead of political influence was a retreat modelled on the operas of Richard Wagner, whom he'd idolised since adolescence. Ludwig sketched the fantasy in his own hand; it fell to the architect Georg von Dollmann to turn those sketches into working drawings and actual stone. The Singers' Hall and Throne Room aren't generic medieval fantasy; they're built around scenes from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, with Ludwig effectively commissioning a piece of architecture as an extension of Wagner's stage designs.

   Did you know? Ludwig II spent only 172 days in the palace he had dreamed of, and it was called New Hohenschwangau until after his death.

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5. 05 Miramare Castle

   Castello di Miramare

   Italy · 7.7 km from Trieste45.702° N 13.712° E

   

   Miramare is the house of a man who wanted to be a sailor and ended as an emperor in front of a firing squad. Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, younger brother of Franz Joseph of Austria and from 1854 commander of the Imperial Navy, chose a bare limestone spur on the Gulf of Trieste for his home; local tradition says he found it while sheltering from a storm in the little harbour of Grignano. The Austrian architect Carl Junker drew the plans in 1856 and the building was finished in 1860, a white eclectic castle that seems to rise straight out of the Adriatic. In 1864 Maximilian left it to become Emperor of Mexico, and in June 1867 he was executed in Mexico. He never lived to see the interiors complete.

   Did you know? In the castle's great hall on 10 April 1864 Maximilian formally accepted the crown of Mexico from a delegation of Mexican notables.

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6. 06 Fort Boyard

   France · 19.2 km from La Rochelle46.000° N 1.214° W

   

   Fort Boyard took fifty-six years to build and was obsolete within two. Construction started in 1801 under Napoleon, aimed at closing a gap in French coastal defences between two islands off La Rochelle, but the project stalled in 1809 and sat unfinished for nearly three decades before Louis Philippe I restarted it in 1837 over renewed friction with Britain. When it was finally completed in 1857, artillery range had moved on so far in the intervening decades that the gap the fort was built to cover no longer needed covering — the fort that took two generations to finish was militarily pointless by the time it could fire a shot.

   Did you know? According to a famous story, Vauban told Louis XIV it would be easier to seize the Moon with one's teeth than to build a fort here.

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7. 07 Peleș Castle

   Romania · 32.4 km from Brașov45.360° N 25.543° E

   

   Peleș Castle rises out of the forest above Sinaia, in the Prahova valley of the southern Carpathians, like a Bavarian fairy-tale castle set down in Romania: steep roofs, painted half-timbering, pinnacles and a main tower 66 metres high against the mountains. It was built for King Carol I, a Hohenzollern prince under whose reign Romania won its independence, and who fell for this valley on his first visit in 1866. The foundation stone was laid in 1873; the German architect Johannes Schultz won the commission after Carol rejected three designs as unoriginal copies of Western palaces, Carol Benesch worked on the building, and the Czech architect Karel Liman added the towers between 1893 and 1914.

   Did you know? The decoration of the castle's 60-seat theatre is credited to the young Gustav Klimt and his colleague Franz Matsch.

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8. 08 Palau Güell

   Spain · 0.9 km from Barcelona41.379° N 2.174° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Before Gaudí became the architect of endless curves and biomorphic facades, he had to prove himself on a plot barely 18 by 22 metres wide, hemmed in on a narrow street in Barcelona's old quarter. Eusebi Güell, the industrialist who'd become his most important patron, commissioned this townhouse in 1885, and what Gaudí produced there — built and largely finished by 1888 — is where you can watch his signature moves arrive for the first time rather than in mature form: the parabolic arch used structurally rather than decoratively, the sense that Catalan Gothic and Moorish tradition were raw material to be recombined rather than styles to be copied.

   Did you know? Carriages entered through one parabolic gate and left by the other, while horses were led down a ramp to stables in the basement.

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9. 09 Citadelle Laferrière

   Haiti · 20.8 km from Cap-Haïtien19.574° N 72.244° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Citadelle Laferrière is the largest fortress in Haiti and one of the largest in the Americas, and it was built by a nation that had only just freed itself. Henri Christophe, a leader of the Haitian Revolution, commissioned it in 1805, the year after independence from France, as the keystone of a defence system against a French return that never came. Tens of thousands of former slaves laboured on it until its completion in 1820; by some estimates the work cost up to 20,000 lives. Christophe, who later declared himself king of northern Haiti, is buried inside: after his suicide in 1820, followers covered his body in quicklime and sealed it in one of the courtyards.

   Did you know? The mortar binding the walls is said to have included quicklime, molasses, the blood of local cows and goats, and boiled cow hooves.

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10. 10 Herrenchiemsee Palace

    Neues Schloss Herrenchiemsee

    Germany · 20.2 km from Rosenheim47.860° N 12.402° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    On an island in the Chiemsee in southern Bavaria, King Ludwig II of Bavaria tried to build his own Versailles. The New Palace of Herrenchiemsee was his homage to Louis XIV, the Sun King he admired: a formal garden with fountains, including a copy of the Latona Fountain, leads to a long Baroque-style façade, and inside, a grand staircase modelled on the vanished Ambassadors' Staircase of Versailles opens onto a sequence of state rooms. Its showpiece is the Hall of Mirrors, 75 metres long, with 17 arches like its French model, 33 chandeliers and 44 candelabra; it is slightly longer than the original, flanked as at Versailles by a Hall of Peace and a Hall of War.

    Did you know? About 16.6 million marks were spent on Herrenchiemsee, more than Linderhof and Neuschwanstein together, pushing the royal finances close to bankruptcy.

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11. 11 Pena Palace

    Portugal · 22.3 km from Lisbon38.788° N 9.391° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Pena Palace looks like a dream that someone decided to build. From the woods above Sintra it rises on a rocky peak in a jumble of towers, domes, crenellations and terraces, painted in strong ochre yellow and deep red, with a clock tower, onion-topped turrets and battlements that seem to belong to five different countries at once. It is one of the most flamboyant monuments of European Romanticism, and it was built by a king consort with an artist's temperament.

    Did you know? A cross has marked the nearby High Cross, at 528 metres the highest point of the Sintra hills, since King John III first raised one in 1522.

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12. 12 Vorontsov Palace, Alupka

    Ukraine · 12.1 km from Yalta44.420° N 34.056° E

    

    The Vorontsov Palace looks like two buildings joined back to back. Seen from the mountain side, it reads as an English country house in the Tudor manner; seen from the sea, it turns into a fantasy of the Islamic world, with a great arched portal modelled on the Jama Masjid in Delhi and an Arabic inscription of the Shahada running above it. The palace stands at Alupka, on the southern coast of Crimea, and was built between 1828 and 1848 for Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, governor-general of New Russia, at a cost of some nine million roubles.

    Did you know? According to a well-known story, Churchill was so taken with the marble lions that he asked Stalin if he could take them home, and Stalin refused.

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13. 13 Palacio Episcopal de Astorga

    Spain42.458° N 6.056° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In a small cathedral town of the Spanish meseta, Antoni Gaudí built a castle for a bishop. The Episcopal Palace of Astorga rises beside the cathedral like a building from a fairy tale: four round corner towers with pointed caps, a deep dry moat, a porch of three great flared arches and a skyline of pinnacles and chimneys, all in pale grey granite. It is one of only a handful of Gaudí buildings outside Catalonia.

    Did you know? A fire destroyed the old episcopal palace of Astorga in 1886, prompting the commission to Gaudí.

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14. 14 Linderhof Palace

    Schloss Linderhof

    Germany47.572° N 10.961° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Linderhof is the smallest of the three palaces that King Ludwig II of Bavaria built for himself, and the only one he saw finished and actually lived in. It stands alone in the Graswang valley in the Ammergau Alps, a largely empty mountain valley where his father, King Maximilian II, had kept a modest hunting lodge. Ludwig inherited the estate, and from 1870 his court architect Georg von Dollmann transformed it step by step; in 1874 the old lodge was moved aside, and the building that rose in its place was a small, intensely ornamented rococo villa in homage to the French Bourbon kings — less Versailles itself than the Petit Trianon.

    Did you know? Between 1863 and 1886 Linderhof cost about 8.46 million gold marks, a fortune for what is the smallest of Ludwig's palaces.

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15. 15 De Haar Castle

    Kingdom of the Netherlands · 9.5 km from Utrecht52.121° N 4.986° E

    

    Kasteel de Haar is the largest castle in the Netherlands, and almost all of what you see is a dream of the 1890s. A castle stood here from at least 1391, when the De Haar family held it as a fief; it was burned and its walls slighted in 1482, rebuilt, and after the last Van Zuylen van de Haar died childless in 1641 it slowly fell to ruin. In 1890 the ruin passed to Baron Etienne van Zuylen van Nyevelt, who had married Hélène de Rothschild a few years earlier. With her family's fortune behind him, he set out to raise a medieval castle more complete than any that had actually survived.

    Did you know? Around 1895 the baron had about 7,000 fully grown trees dug up elsewhere and replanted at De Haar so the new park would look mature at once.

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16. 16 Château de Chantilly

    France · 38.6 km from Paris49.194° N 2.486° E

    

    Chantilly looks like a stage set: pale stone and steep roofs rising straight out of water, with Le Nôtre's canals and basins spread out in front and forest all around. It is really two buildings joined together. The Petit Château, built around 1560 and probably designed by Jean Bullant for the Montmorency family, is the refined Renaissance survivor. The Grand Château beside it was wrecked in the Revolution and rebuilt between 1875 and the early 1880s by Henri d'Orléans, duc d'Aumale, son of King Louis-Philippe, who wanted a setting worthy of the collection he had spent his life assembling.

    Did you know? In October 1926 thieves stole the Grand Condé, a 9.01-carat pink diamond, in the only theft in the museum's history; it was recovered the next year.

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