The Most Beautiful Castles in Europe

81 places in 24 countries · updated 14 October 2026

1. 01 Castel Sant'Angelo

   Italy · 1.4 km from Rome41.903° N 12.466° E

   

   Its current name comes from a specific legend: in 590 CE, during a plague, Pope Gregory the Great is said to have seen the Archangel Michael appear on the summit sheathing his sword — read as a sign the epidemic was ending. A statue of the angel has stood on top ever since, and the building has cycled through duty as papal residence, state prison, and now museum, on top of its original job as a tomb.

   Did you know? The mausoleum was originally topped with a garden and a gilded four-horse chariot, or quadriga.

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2. 02 Prague Castle

   Pražský hrad

   Czech Republic · 1.7 km from Prague50.090° N 14.400° E

   

   What makes it extraordinary is that it is not one building but a millennium of them. The Romanesque Basilica of St George, the oldest church still standing inside the walls, sits a few steps from St Vitus Cathedral, a Gothic project begun under Charles IV in the 14th century and only finished in 1929. The Old Royal Palace holds Vladislav Hall, the vast late-Gothic hall that master builder Benedikt Rejt raised for King Vladislaus II after 1485. After a great fire in 1541 the Habsburgs added Renaissance pieces, among them the Belvedere summer palace that Ferdinand I built for Queen Anne, and Rudolf II turned the castle into his main residence and a home for his famous art collections.

   Did you know? The St Wenceslas Crown kept here was made for Charles IV's coronation in 1347, weighs about 2.5 kg and is said to hold a thorn from Christ's crown.

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3. 03 Rock of Cashel

   Ireland52.520° N 7.890° W

   

   Long before the churches, this was a seat of power: the kings of Munster ruled from Cashel from early times, and Brian Boru was crowned here in 977. Local tradition gives the rock a more colourful origin — it is said to be a mouthful of stone spat out by the Devil when Saint Patrick drove him from a gap in the mountains to the north, the Devil's Bit, and Patrick himself is said to have converted the King of Munster here in the fifth century. In 1101 King Muirchertach Ua Briain gave the fortress to the Church, and from then on Cashel became an ecclesiastical centre.

   Did you know? The chapel's twin towers show German influence, and an Irish abbot in Regensburg is recorded as sending two carpenters to help build it.

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4. 04 Wawel Castle

   Zamek Królewski na Wawelu

   Poland · 1.8 km from Kraków50.054° N 19.937° E

   

   The hill was fortified early; stone churches and halls appeared here in the 10th and 11th centuries, when Kraków became a ducal and then royal seat. Casimir III the Great built a Gothic castle around a courtyard in the 14th century, and Władysław Jagiełło and Queen Jadwiga added towers such as the Hen's Foot. The decisive transformation came under Sigismund I the Old: after a fire in 1499 he had the residence rebuilt between 1507 and 1536 in the new Italian manner, with Francesco the Florentine and then Bartolomeo Berrecci in charge. The result is the arcaded courtyard that defines Wawel – Italian in its loggias, northern in its steep projecting roof and an unusually tall top storey.

   Did you know? After seizing Wawel in 1794, Prussian troops took the Polish crown jewels to Berlin and melted them down for gold and gems; only the sword Szczerbiec survived.

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5. 05 Trakai Island Castle

   Lithuania · 25 km from Vilnius54.653° N 24.933° E

   

   Grand Duke Kęstutis began building in stone in the second half of the 14th century and moved his residence and treasury here; the works were largely finished around 1409 under his son Vytautas the Great, who died in the castle in 1430. The builders used Gothic red brick over stone footings. The complex has two parts: a ducal palace with a tall keep, closed around an inner courtyard that once had wooden galleries, and a larger outer bailey ringed by walls and corner towers, separated from the palace by a moat. The ducal hall on the palace's ground floor was one of the largest rooms in the country.

   Did you know? The red-brick walls of the castle are around 2.5 metres thick.

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6. 06 Castel del Monte

   Italy · 26.1 km from Barletta41.085° N 16.271° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Why Frederick wanted an octagon is still argued over. It may echo the Dome of the Rock, which he saw on crusade, or Charlemagne's octagonal chapel at Aachen; some read it as a figure halfway between the square of the earth and the circle of the sky. There is no moat and no drawbridge, and it was once dismissed as a hunting lodge, although archaeologists now think it had a curtain wall and served as a citadel. The main door, facing east, is framed like a classical temple front, with fluted pilasters and a pediment — a sign of the emperor's taste for antiquity. Theories linking the castle to the Templars have been firmly rejected by historians.

   Did you know? Rain falling on the roofs was channelled into cisterns inside several towers and into a large cistern beneath the courtyard.

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7. 07 Lichtenstein Castle

   Schloss Lichtenstein

   Germany48.407° N 9.258° E

   

   The castle was designed by Carl Alexander Heideloff and built in 1840–1842 on the foundations of a late-medieval castle of 1390, itself a successor to an older fortress whose ruins lie about 500 metres away. The site is dramatic: about 817 metres above sea level and some 250 metres above the Echaz. Later additions include a barbican and an outer bailey with bastions and turrets built in 1857, and caponiers modelled on those of the Fortress of Ulm, added by the count, a keen artillery officer.

   Did you know? The first castle on the rock went up around 1100 and was destroyed twice, in 1311 and again between 1377 and 1381.

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8. 08 Tower of London

   United Kingdom · 3 km from London51.508° N 0.076° W

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   Around the keep, later kings wrapped two concentric rings of walls and a moat. Richard I doubled the enclosure, Henry III added the north and east walls with their towers, and Edward I completed the outer ward in 1285, fixing the plan that survives today. Thirteen towers stud the inner curtain wall, each with a character of its own: Beauchamp Tower, an early example of large-scale brickwork in post-Roman Britain; the Bell Tower with its alarm belfry; the Bloody Tower, named in the sixteenth century after the presumed murder of the Princes in the Tower. The small Tudor chapel of St Peter ad Vincula, rebuilt in 1519, stands inside the inner ward.

   Did you know? Louis IX of France sent Henry III an African elephant in the 1250s; it died in 1258, possibly after being given red wine.

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9. 09 Nesvizh Castle

   Нясвіжскі палацава-паркавы комплекс

   Belarus53.223° N 26.692° E

   • UNESCO World Heritage

   

   The Radziwiłłs held Nesvizh from 1533. In 1582 Mikołaj Krzysztof Radziwiłł, nicknamed "the Orphan", began replacing the old fortress with a square three-storey palace, finished by 1604, whose corners were defended by octagonal towers; for a time the state archive of the Grand Duchy, the Lithuanian Metrica, was kept here. Swedish troops of Charles XII sacked the castle in 1706 during the Great Northern War, and in the rebuilding that followed the separate wings were joined into one building and the façades received their Baroque stucco.

   Did you know? Its late-16th-century guns were cast with names such as Crocodile, Salamander, Parrot, Owl and Hydra, many bearing menacing Latin mottoes on the barrel.

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10. 10 Český Krumlov Castle

    Český Krumlov

    Czech Republic · 21.4 km from České Budějovice48.813° N 14.315° E

    

    The theatre is what sets Krumlov apart from other great Central European residences. It was first built in wood in 1680–1682 under Johann Christian I of Eggenberg and refitted with new stage machinery in 1765–1766 under Joseph Adam of Schwarzenberg. It survives with its auditorium, deep stage and the original wooden machinery for fast scene changes, and it counts among the best-preserved Baroque theatres in the world. It is reached from the palace by the Cloak Bridge of 1764, a five-storey arcaded bridge across a deep rock-cut ravine whose upper levels are covered passages.

    Did you know? According to legend, the Rosenbergs were related to the Italian Orsini family, whose name derives from orsa, she-bear, hence the bears in the moat.

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11. 11 Vianden Castle

    Luxembourg · 6.3 km from Diekirch49.935° N 6.203° E

    

    The castle's survival is a story of rescue. In 1820 King William I of the Netherlands sold it to a local alderman, who stripped it and sold off the roof tiles, panelling, doors, windows, beams and lead. Public anger led the king to buy back the ruin in 1827, but little was done for decades. Prince Henry of the Netherlands re-roofed the chapel in 1851. Grand Duke Adolphe then brought in the German castle specialist Bodo Ebhardt, and his work stopped with the First World War. In November 1944 members of the Luxembourg Resistance held the castle against an SS attack. Real reconstruction began only after Grand Duke Jean handed the castle to the state in 1977, and it was finished in 1990.

    Did you know? William the Silent built Luxembourg's first blast furnace at Vianden in 1564, two years before leaving to lead the Dutch revolt against Philip II.

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12. 12 Neuschwanstein Castle

    Schloss Neuschwanstein

    Germany47.557° N 10.749° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Underneath the turrets it was surprisingly modern for its decade: running water on every floor, forced-air central heating, and telephone lines connecting rooms — comforts most contemporary castles in Europe didn't have, hidden behind walls designed to look centuries older. None of it was paid for with state money; Ludwig financed construction almost entirely through personal loans and his private fortune, which is exactly what fed the rumours of financial recklessness his ministers used to have him declared mentally unfit in 1886.

    Did you know? The first design came from Christian Jank, a theatre scenery painter, rather than from an architect.

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13. 13 Khotyn Fortress

    Хотинська фортеця

    Ukraine · 19.1 km from Kamianets-Podilskyi48.522° N 26.498° E

    

    For four centuries the fortress sat on the fault line between Moldavia, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the Ottoman Empire, and it changed hands accordingly. In 1476 its garrison held off Sultan Mehmed II. Its most famous episode came in September and October 1621, when a Commonwealth army under Hetman Jan Karol Chodkiewicz, fighting alongside Zaporozhian Cossacks led by Petro Sahaidachny, dug in beside the fortress and withstood a much larger Ottoman army under Osman II; the peace signed on 8 October fixed the frontier on the Dniester. Jan Sobieski took Khotyn in 1673, the Ottomans rebuilt and enlarged the defences in 1712-1718, and Russian armies stormed it in 1739, 1769 and 1788.

    Did you know? In 1538 Polish troops under Hetman Jan Tarnowski undermined the walls, bringing down three towers and part of the western wall.

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14. 14 Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg

    France48.249° N 7.344° E

    

    What makes the castle unusual is its second life. The ruin was listed as a French historic monument in 1862. After the Franco-Prussian War Alsace became part of the German Empire, and in 1899 the town of Sélestat gave the ruin to Emperor Wilhelm II. He wanted a showpiece of German medieval culture in the newly annexed province, a western counterpart to the restored Marienburg in Prussia. The Berlin architect and castle scholar Bodo Ebhardt rebuilt it between 1900 and 1908. His aim was to show the castle as it might have looked around 1500, before its destruction. He worked from the surviving walls, archives and comparisons with castles of the same period.

    Did you know? The castle well reaches down 62.5 metres into the sandstone rock.

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15. 15 Miramare Castle

    Castello di Miramare

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

    

    Those interiors are the reason to come, because they survive almost as the couple arranged them, with mid-19th-century furniture and objects still in place; a photographic record the archduke commissioned made the arrangement possible to reconstruct. On the ground floor his bedroom and study copy the cabin and stern wardroom of the frigate Novara, the warship that circumnavigated the globe in 1857 to 1859 under his command. The library is lined floor to ceiling with books, and the archduchess Charlotte's rooms are hung with pale blue silk.

    Did you know? He left for Mexico on 14 April 1864 aboard the frigate Novara, the same ship whose cabins his rooms at Miramare imitate.

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16. 16 Château de Vincennes

    France · 6.3 km from Paris48.843° N 2.436° E

    

    Charles V also laid the foundations of the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes to house relics acquired by Saint Louis. Begun in 1379 and finished only in 1552 under Henry II, it is an outstanding example of Flamboyant Gothic, and some of its Renaissance stained glass depicting the Apocalypse survives in the apse. In 1422 Henry V of England, then master of northern France, died in the castle. In the 17th century Louis XIV had the royal architect Louis Le Vau build a new classical residence, the King's Pavilion, finished in 1658, before the court left for Versailles.

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17. 17 St Michael's Mount

    United Kingdom · 5.5 km from Penzance50.117° N 5.478° W

    

    The Cornish name, Karrek Loos yn Koos, means "the grey rock in a wood", and may preserve a memory of the forest that once covered the bay before the sea rose over it, roughly around 1700 BC. Local tradition holds that in 495 fishermen saw the Archangel Michael standing on a ledge of the rock, and from the 12th century the island was a Benedictine priory linked to Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, its twin across the Channel. Another legend makes it the home of the giant Cormoran, slain by a Cornish boy named Jack – the origin of the tale of Jack the Giant Killer.

    Did you know? When the 1755 Lisbon earthquake sent a tsunami to Cornwall, the sea at the Mount rose about two metres in ten minutes and kept surging for five hours.

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18. 18 Pfalzgrafenstein Castle

    Burg Pfalzgrafenstein

    Germany · 32 km from Koblenz50.083° N 7.766° E

    

    The first part was the central tower, raised in 1326–27 by King Ludwig IV the Bavarian to increase his toll income. Standing alone on the island, it was built on a pentagonal plan with a sharp point upstream to break the force of floods and ice; today it is 36 metres high with six storeys. The new toll station angered the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne, whose own revenues it threatened, and Pope John XXII urged them to act against Ludwig. Around 1340 a turreted outer wall was built around the tower, and in 1339 the castle was given to Ludwig's nephew, the Count Palatine Rudolf II, from whom it takes its name, "the Count Palatine's stone".

    Did you know? When Blücher crossed the Rhine here on New Year's night 1814, his army brought over some 20,000 horses and around 200 guns along with its 60,000 men.

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19. 19 Schwerin Castle

    Schweriner Schloss

    Germany · 1 km from Schwerin53.624° N 11.419° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The rebuilding was a collaboration between several of the leading architects of the time, Georg Adolph Demmler, Gottfried Semper, Friedrich August Stüler and Ernst Friedrich Zwirner. Demmler, a pupil of Schinkel, took his inspiration from the Renaissance châteaux of the Loire, above all Chambord. Stüler added the equestrian statue of the Obotrite prince Niklot and the dome. Parts of the older palace were kept, including the 16th-century chapel, the first new Protestant church in Mecklenburg, with a Renaissance portal by the Dresden sculptor Hans Walther. The result is one of the key works of Romantic historicism in Europe.

    Did you know? In 'Kingsman: The Golden Circle' (2017) the palace stood in for the residence of the Swedish royal family.

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20. 20 Hluboká Castle

    Zámek Hluboká nad Vltavou

    Czech Republic · 8 km from České Budějovice49.051° N 14.442° E

    

    The architect Franz Beer drew the plans in 1839 and ran the building site from 1840 until his death, and Franz Damasus Deworetzky finished the work by 1871. The result is one of the finest Romantic Neo-Gothic buildings in Central Europe: crenellated towers, pinnacles, oriel windows and battlements in a Tudor manner, set around courtyards on the edge of a steep drop. Inside, the Schwarzenbergs spared nothing. Walls and ceilings are panelled and carved in wood, hung with leather, textiles and Brussels tapestries; the library with its coffered ceiling, the armoury, the dining halls and salons and the Neo-Gothic chapel with a late-Gothic altar are all kept with their original furnishings.

    Did you know? The powerful nobleman Záviš of Falkenštejn was executed on the meadow beneath the castle walls on 24 August 1290.

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21. 21 Swallow's Nest

    Ластівчине гніздо

    Ukraine · 8 km from Yalta44.431° N 34.129° E

    

    In 1927 a major earthquake shook the Crimean coast hard enough to be felt as far as Yalta, and while the building itself came through largely intact, the cliff it stands on cracked badly.

    Did you know? Its architect Leonid Sherwood was the son of Vladimir Sherwood, designer of the State Historical Museum on Red Square in Moscow.

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22. 22 Riegersburg Castle

    Riegersburg

    Austria47.005° N 15.932° E

    

    The first knight recorded here, Rudiger von Hohenberg, appears in 1122. In the later Middle Ages the castle belonged to the Walsee family, who came into conflict with the ruler of Styria in 1415. Its decisive period came in the 17th century under Baroness Katharina Elisabeth von Wechsler, known as the Gallerin, the most important figure in the castle's history. Between 1637 and 1653 she enlarged and fortified it into one of the largest and strongest castles of its time, ringed by about 3 kilometres of walls with five gates and two moats, and containing 108 rooms.

    Did you know? Around ten hectares of vineyards grow inside the castle walls, a tradition dating back to the time of its 17th-century mistress, the Gallerin.

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23. 23 Bamburgh Castle

    United Kingdom55.609° N 1.711° W

    

    Before the stone castle there was a royal fortress. A Brittonic stronghold known as Din Guarie may have stood here in the 5th and 6th centuries; in 547 the Anglian king Ida took it, and around 600 it was named Bebbanburg after Bebba, wife of King Æthelfrith. For a time this was a seat of the kings of Northumbria. Archaeology from that age, including burials of the 7th and 8th centuries, is displayed in the castle, and Bernard Cornwell's Saxon novels made Bebbanburg famous again as the home of the fictional Uhtred.

    Did you know? The Bamburgh Sword was forged from six pattern-welded strands of iron, when no other known blade of that age used more than four, hinting at a royal owner.

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24. 24 Malbork Castle

    Zamek w Malborku

    Poland · 27.7 km from Elbląg54.040° N 19.028° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    In 1410 the Teutonic Order suffered a catastrophic defeat at Grunwald against the combined Polish–Lithuanian army — the kind of loss that ends states. Yet when the victors marched on Malbork itself and laid siege to it that same year, the castle's defences held, and the siege was abandoned. The Order survived the disaster specifically because this one fortress didn't fall; it still took another century and a half of slow decline before Malbork finally passed out of Teutonic hands.

    Did you know? When work was completed around 1406 after more than 130 years of building, it was the largest brick castle anywhere.

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25. 25 Castelgrande

    Switzerland · 0.5 km from Bellinzona46.193° N 9.023° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    Most of what stands today was built between 1250 and 1500. The Milanese cleared the crowded interior of houses and chapels, divided the flat hilltop, some 150 to 200 metres across, into three large baileys for troops, and raised and extended the outer walls, tying them into the town walls and into the Murata, a wall thrown right across the valley of the Ticino to control and tax the Gotthard traffic. Two towers dominate the skyline: the slender 13th-century Torre Bianca, the White Tower, in the old keep, and the 14th-century Torre Nera, from which the walls between the baileys radiate.

    Did you know? The Roman fort on the hill could hold a whole cohort, and in 475 its smaller garrison defeated a force of about 900 Alemanni.

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26. 26 Kroměříž Castle

    Czech Republic · 20.3 km from Zlín49.300° N 17.393° E

    • UNESCO World Heritage

    

    The palace has a long history of destruction and rebuilding. A late-Gothic residence built around 1500 was sacked by the Swedish army in 1643 during the Thirty Years' War. From 1664 Bishop Karl of Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn had it rebuilt in Baroque style by the Italian architect Filiberto Lucchese and, after his death, by Giovanni Pietro Tencalla. When fire gutted the building in 1752, Bishop Hamilton brought in two of the leading painters of the empire, Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern, to decorate the state rooms. Their ceilings still frame the palace's great halls, and the rooms were used by Miloš Forman as a stand-in for Vienna's Hofburg in the film Amadeus.

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27. 27 Hohenzollern Castle

    Burg Hohenzollern

    Germany48.324° N 8.967° E

    

    Architect Friedrich August Stüler based the new build on English Gothic Revival forms and the châteaux of the Loire Valley — a curious set of references for the ancestral seat of what would become the German imperial family, and a reminder that "authentic" medieval-revival castles were usually assembled from whichever foreign models the architect found most castle-like at the time. Frederick William IV died in 1861, six years before the project he'd started was finished by his brother, Wilhelm I, in 1867.

    Did you know? In 1945 Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of the last Kaiser, fled here from Potsdam ahead of the Red Army; he and his wife Cecilie are buried at the castle.

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28. 28 Windsor Castle

    United Kingdom · 26.1 km from Reading51.484° N 0.604° W

    

    The silhouette most people know is surprisingly young. Under George IV, from 1824, the architect Jeffry Wyatville reworked the Upper Ward into a romantic Gothic fantasy and raised the Round Tower by about thirty feet so that it would dominate the skyline, at a cost that ran past a million pounds by 1840. Inside, the State Apartments combine seventeenth-century rooms by Hugh May at the western end with Wyatville's grand Georgian sequence to the east.

    Did you know? England's earliest weight-driven mechanical clock was installed for Edward III in the Round Tower in 1354.

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29. 29 Corvin Castle

    Castelul Corvinilor

    Romania · 15.1 km from Deva45.749° N 22.888° E

    

    In 1409 King Sigismund of Luxembourg granted the royal estate of Hunedoara, with an existing fortification, to Voicu (Vajk), a knight at his court. His son John Hunyadi – voivode of Transylvania, regent of Hungary from 1446 and the most celebrated general of his age against the Ottomans – rebuilt the old keep into the family's seat from the 1440s. The core of the castle, including the Knights' Hall and the Diet Hall with their rib vaults, the defensive towers and the keep named Nebojša ('fear not'), dates from his time.

    Did you know? A fire in April 1854 swept through the entire building, and with earlier blazes it earned the castle the nickname Black Castle.

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30. 30 Eilean Donan Castle

    United Kingdom57.274° N 5.516° W

    

    The island takes its name from Donnán of Eigg, a Celtic saint martyred in 617. A fortified castle was first built in the 13th century, in the reign of Alexander II, and over the following centuries it grew and shrank as a stronghold of the Clan Mackenzie and their allies, the MacRaes. Its end as a working fortress came in 1719, during a Jacobite rising backed by Spain: a garrison of Spanish soldiers held the castle until Royal Navy frigates bombarded it, and the landing party blew it up with the defenders' own gunpowder. For two centuries only broken walls remained.

    Did you know? According to legend, the castle was founded by a Matheson chief's son who could talk to birds and won the favour of King Alexander II.

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