The Most Beautiful Castle Ruins in Europe

17 places in 9 countries · updated 13 October 2026

1. 01 Spiš Castle

   Spišský hrad

   Slovakia · 34.5 km from Prešov49.001° N 20.768° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The castle grew outward in rings. A Romanesque stone core with a two-storey palace and a basilica was built by the thirteenth century. A second outer ward in the fourteenth century doubled its area, and in the fifteenth century the walls were raised and a third ward added. The Hungarian kings owned it until the late fifteenth century. The Zápolya family then turned the upper castle into a comfortable residence and added a late Gothic chapel around 1470. The Thurzó family held it after them, and from 1638 the Csáky family. The Csákys moved out in the early eighteenth century to more comfortable country houses nearby.

   Did you know? Archaeologists have found that the hill was lived on almost continuously from the 5th millennium BC until the castle was abandoned in the 18th century.

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2. 02 Tintagel Castle

   United Kingdom50.668° N 4.761° W

   

   The island was important long before any castle. Between about 450 and 600 it was a high-status settlement, probably a seasonal seat of the rulers of Dumnonia, and excavations have turned up more imported Mediterranean pottery – amphorae and fine red tableware – than any other site of that period in Britain or Ireland; digs in 2016–17 uncovered the outlines of buildings of the 5th or 6th century and a slate bearing writing. The stone castle came later.

   Did you know? A slate found in 1998, known as the Artognou stone, carries an incised Latin inscription from the centuries after Roman rule.

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3. 03 Heidelberg Castle

   Heidelberger Schloss

   Germany · 1.6 km from Heidelberg49.411° N 8.716° E

   

   Frederick V's acceptance of the Bohemian crown in 1619 set off the Thirty Years' War, and from then on the castle's story is one of destruction. General Tilly took it in 1622; Swedes and imperial troops fought over it in the 1630s. In the War of the Grand Alliance French troops set it on fire when they withdrew in March 1689, blowing the front off the Fat Tower, and in 1693 they came back and blew up the towers and walls that had survived. The electors moved their court to Mannheim in 1720, and a new plan to return ended in 1764 when lightning struck the building twice and set it ablaze. For decades afterwards the townspeople used it as a quarry.

   Did you know? The walls of the Fat Tower were about seven metres thick, and the tower was some 28 metres across.

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4. 04 Peyrepertuse

   Château de Peyrepertuse

   France · 34 km from Perpignan42.871° N 2.555° E

   

   A castle is documented here from the early eleventh century, under lords tied to the Catalan counts of Besalú and later Barcelona. During the Albigensian Crusade Guillaume de Peyrepertuse was excommunicated in 1224, and in 1240, as royal power took hold of the region, he surrendered the castle to Louis IX. The king made it a royal fortress on the new frontier with Aragon, confirmed by the Treaty of Corbeil in 1258, and from 1242 had a second stronghold, the Sant Jordi keep, built on the highest point of the ridge.

   Did you know? The name comes from the Occitan Pèirapertusa, meaning 'pierced stone'.

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5. 05 Krzyżtopór

   Poland50.714° N 21.311° E

   

   The design has often been compared to the Farnese palace at Caprarola in Italy. Inside the fortifications rose a three-storey palace on a rectangular plan around an oval inner courtyard, with a great hall in a wing ending in an octagonal tower; the side wings, with four square corner towers, framed a large entrance court. The façades were painted yellow and decorated with portraits of the Ossolińskis and their kin. In 1894 the historian Stanisław Tomkowicz attributed the design to a builder named in the sources as Laurentius de Sente, known in Poland as Wawrzyniec Senes, who is recorded as the castle's architect in 1643.

   Did you know? The perimeter walls run for about 700 metres around a complex covering some 1.3 hectares.

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6. 06 Dunnottar Castle

   United Kingdom · 22.9 km from Aberdeen56.946° N 2.197° W

   

   The site may have been fortified in the early Middle Ages: the Annals of Ulster record sieges of Dún Foither in 681 and 694, and Scottish chronicles place the death of King Donald II here during a Viking attack in 900, although archaeologists have not proved that the early fort stood on this exact headland. The buildings seen now date mostly from the 14th to the 17th centuries. William Keith, Marischal of Scotland, raised the stone tower house in the late 1300s, and his descendants, the Earls Marischal, held the castle for more than three centuries.

   Did you know? The Scottish crown jewels first arrived at Dunnottar in 1651 hidden in sacks of wool, brought by a woman named Katherine Drummond.

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7. 07 Trosky Castle

   Czech Republic · 33.3 km from Liberec50.516° N 15.231° E

   

   In the 15th century Trosky was a Catholic stronghold during the Hussite Wars and was never taken by the Hussites, although it burned in 1428 and was besieged by the Taborites. From 1438 a robber knight, Kryštof Šov of Helfenburg, used it as a base to terrorise the surrounding countryside until the towns of the Lusatian League defeated him in 1444. King George of Poděbrady's army took the castle in 1469. Over the following century it lost its role as a noble residence, passed to Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1622, and was burned by the imperial army in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, after which it stayed a ruin.

   Did you know? The summit of Panna stands 511 metres above sea level and that of Baba 502 metres, only nine metres apart in height.

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8. 08 Caerlaverock Castle

   United Kingdom · 10.3 km from Dumfries54.976° N 3.524° W

   

   The Maxwell family held these lands from about 1220, when Alexander II granted them to Sir John Maxwell. His first castle, square and among the earliest stone castles in Scotland, was abandoned for a rock outcrop some 200 metres to the north, where his brother Sir Aymer began the present building; it was finished in the 1270s. In July 1300 Edward I of England arrived with a large army that included eighty-seven English barons. The garrison held out for a time before surrendering, and it turned out that only about sixty men had resisted the whole force.

   Did you know? According to legend, the bard Myrddin went mad after his king fell in a battle of 573 fought over Caer-Laverock, a story that helped inspire Merlin.

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9. 09 Urquhart Castle

   United Kingdom · 20.3 km from Inverness57.324° N 4.442° W

   

   The castle itself goes back to the thirteenth century, when Alexander II granted the lands to Thomas de Lundin and a first stronghold was raised on the motte at the south-west end of the site. It enters written history in 1296, when Edward I of England captured it at the start of the Wars of Scottish Independence, and in 1307 Robert the Bruce took it back as a royal fortress. Through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the castle was repeatedly raided by the MacDonald Lords of the Isles in their struggle for the earldom of Ross. In 1509 James IV granted it to the Grants, who rebuilt and strengthened it, yet still suffered the MacDonalds' Great Raid of 1545.

   Did you know? King David II spent the summer of 1342 hunting at Urquhart, the only reigning monarch known to have stayed there.

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10. 10 Rocca Calascio

    Castello di Rocca Calascio

    Italy · 24.7 km from L’Aquila42.329° N 13.689° E

    

    Its origins are military and modest. The site began as a single watchtower, generally dated to the tenth century, placed to watch over the high plateau and the valleys around it. In the thirteenth century a walled enclosure was built around it, reinforced with four round towers at the corners, and the lower courses of the walls were laid with noticeably larger blocks to resist undermining. The builders worked purely for defence: there is little decoration, only the geometry of tower, curtain and rock. A powerful earthquake in 1461 wrecked much of the fortress, and it was never fully rebuilt; what stands today is a partial ruin, consolidated but open to the wind.

    Did you know? It belonged to a chain of watchtowers that relayed signals across the mountains from the Apennines towards the Adriatic coast.

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11. 11 Castle of the Moors

    Portugal · 22.4 km from Lisbon38.793° N 9.390° W

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    A chapel of São Pedro inside the walls became a parish church in the 12th century, and in 1375 King Ferdinand I ordered the castle rebuilt. But the inhabitants were drifting down to the town of Sintra, and by the end of the 15th century the chapel was abandoned. The small Jewish community that used the site was expelled under Manuel I, and the castle was left empty. The 1755 earthquake badly damaged it.

    Did you know? Archaeologists have found the remains of an Islamic quarter between the walls, with house foundations, storage silos, a communal oven and pottery from the 10th to 12th centuries.

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12. 12 Corfe Castle

    United Kingdom · 15 km from Bournemouth50.640° N 2.059° W

    

    The first castle here was raised by William the Conqueror soon after the Norman Conquest of 1066. Under Henry I a great stone keep was begun around the end of the eleventh century and finished by 1105, built of the local Purbeck limestone. The site already carried a darker story: tradition places the murder of the young king Edward the Martyr here in 978, before the castle existed in its present form. King John favoured Corfe as a stronghold and a prison, and he and Henry III extended it considerably in the thirteenth century, turning it into a royal fortress with layered wards climbing the hill.

    Did you know? It was one of the first castles in England built partly of stone, at a time when nearly all others were raised in earth and timber.

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13. 13 Ogrodzieniec Castle

    Ruiny zamku Ogrodzieniec

    Poland50.453° N 19.552° E

    

    A first fortification of earth and timber stood here in the early twelfth century, under Bolesław III Wrymouth, and was destroyed during the Mongol invasion of 1241. In the mid-fourteenth century the Włodek family of the Sulima coat of arms built a Gothic castle, using three tall rocks as part of the defences: walls closed the gaps between them, and a narrow cleft between two crags served as the entrance. The castle's great period came after 1523, when it was bought by Jan Boner; his nephew Seweryn Boner replaced the medieval fortress with a Renaissance residence between 1530 and 1545.

    Did you know? After a visit to Ogrodzieniec in 1906, the Polish Sightseeing Society was founded, and the outline of the ruins went onto its badge.

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14. 14 Dunluce Castle

    United Kingdom55.211° N 6.579° W

    

    The first castle was built in the thirteenth century by Richard de Burgh, the Earl of Ulster. By the early 1500s it was held by the McQuillans, and in 1584 it was seized by Sorley Boy MacDonnell, whose clan made it their chief seat in Antrim and remodelled it in a Scottish manner. One fine detail ties it to wider history: when the Girona, a galleass of the Spanish Armada, was wrecked on the rocks nearby, cannons from the ship were mounted in the castle's gatehouse. Over the following decades the castle was softened into a residence, and the tall gables and chimneys that dominate the ruin today speak of household life as much as of defence.

    Did you know? The castle is often suggested as the inspiration for Cair Paravel, the royal castle in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia.

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15. 15 Kilchurn Castle

    United Kingdom56.404° N 5.027° W

    

    The castle was begun around 1450 by Sir Colin Campbell, first laird of Glenorchy, founder of what became the most powerful branch of Clan Campbell in the central Highlands. His five-storey tower house is still the core of the site, and for about a century and a half Kilchurn was the family's headquarters. After the Jacobite rising of 1689 the Earl of Breadalbane turned it into a garrison: in the 1690s a three-storey L-shaped block was added along the north side to house around two hundred soldiers, and these are now counted as the oldest surviving barracks on the British mainland. A lightning strike in 1760 did serious damage, and the castle was abandoned for good.

    Did you know? The site belonged to Clan Gregor before Colin Campbell took it around 1440.

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16. 16 Saint Hilarion Castle

    Cyprus · 5 km from Kyrenia35.312° N 33.281° E

    

    The fortress takes its name not from the famous Palestinian hermit Hilarion but from an obscure holy man who, by tradition, fled to Cyprus after the Arab conquest of the Holy Land and lived as a hermit on this summit. The Byzantines began fortifying the peak in the 11th century as part of the island's defence against Arab raids. Under the Lusignan kings who ruled Cyprus after the Crusades the castle was strengthened again and may have served as a royal summer residence, and around 1230 it was fought over in the four-year struggle between the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and the regent John of Ibelin.

    Did you know? According to tradition, Prince John of Antioch, fearing betrayal, threw his Bulgarian bodyguards to their deaths from the tower that now bears his name.

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17. 17 Château de la Mothe-Chandeniers

    France47.092° N 0.033° E

    

    The site is old: a fortified motte stood here in the 13th century, held by the Bauçay family, lords around Loudun. What survives, however, is a nineteenth-century dream. After Baron Joseph Lejeune bought the estate in 1857, he had it rebuilt by the young Parisian architect Adolphe Gaumont in a romantic neo-Gothic manner that borrowed openly from the great Loire châteaux, Blois and above all Azay-le-Rideau, whose trick of setting the whole building in water was repeated here. On 13 March 1932 a fire, blamed on the installation of central heating, gutted the main building and consumed its furnishings; only the chapel, the outbuildings and the dovecote came through.

    Did you know? Around 18,500 people from 115 countries joined that first campaign, creating what has been called the largest co-ownership of a property in the world.

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