The Most Beautiful Castles in Germany
9 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful castles in Germany are Lichtenstein Castle, Neuschwanstein Castle and Pfalzgrafenstein Castle. The list covers 9 castles. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Germany's castles come in two great waves. The first is medieval: the Holy Roman Empire was a patchwork of hundreds of princes, bishops and knights, and each fortified a hill, a river crossing or a toll point, above all along the Rhine. The second is Romantic: in the 19th century, kings and nobles rebuilt ruins and raised new castles on dramatic sites as statements of national and dynastic pride. Forested hills and steep river valleys gave both waves ideal stages.
Neuschwanstein, built for King Ludwig II of Bavaria, is the most famous product of that Romantic dream, set above a gorge in the Alpine foothills. Lichtenstein Castle clings to a cliff in the Swabian Jura, and Hohenzollern Castle crowns an isolated summit as the ancestral seat of the Prussian royal house. Schwerin Castle occupies an island in a lake, its gilded domes and turrets reflected in the water.
The medieval line is just as strong. Pfalzgrafenstein stands on a rock in the middle of the Rhine, built to collect tolls from passing ships. Eltz Castle, hidden in a wooded valley above the Moselle, has belonged to the same family for more than eight centuries. The Wartburg in Thuringia is where Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German, and Burghausen stretches along a ridge above the Salzach as one of the longest castle complexes anywhere. Moritzburg, a baroque hunting lodge on an artificial island near Dresden, shows how a castle became a stage for court life.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Lichtenstein Castle | Castle | |
| 2 | Neuschwanstein Castle | Palace | ✓ |
| 3 | Pfalzgrafenstein Castle | Castle | |
| 4 | Schwerin Castle | Castle | ✓ |
| 5 | Hohenzollern Castle | Castle | |
| 6 | Moritzburg Castle | Castle | |
| 7 | Burghausen Castle | Castle | |
| 8 | Wartburg | Castle | ✓ |
| 9 | Eltz Castle | Castle |
01 Lichtenstein Castle
Schloss Lichtenstein
Germany48.407° N 9.258° E
Image by osmanzoellner from Pixabay The best views are from the bailey across to the tower, and from the cliff edge out over the valley. Lichtenstein inspired imitations as far away as Indiana and Cape Town, proof of how completely it captured the romantic idea of a knight's castle.
Did you know? The knightly family of Lichtenstein died out in 1687, when its last known member fell fighting the Ottoman Turks.
02 Neuschwanstein Castle
Schloss Neuschwanstein
Germany47.557° N 10.749° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by derwiki from Pixabay At 65 metres, the castle's tallest points would have felt appropriately monumental to Ludwig, but that scale hasn't stopped it becoming shorthand for a completely different kind of fantasy: it's widely cited as one of the visual inspirations behind Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty Castle, decades after Ludwig's death turned his private refuge into one of the most photographed buildings on Earth — an irony he was famously reclusive enough to have hated.
Did you know? Of more than 200 rooms planned, only about 15 rooms and halls were ever finished.
03 Pfalzgrafenstein Castle
Burg Pfalzgrafenstein
Germany · 32 km from Koblenz50.083° N 7.766° E
Jörg Braukmann · CC BY-SA 4.0 The castle withstood a 39-day siege in 1504 during the War of the Landshut Succession. In 1607 Elector Friedrich IV added a gun bastion pointing upstream, inner arcades and the outer wall as it now stands, making Pfalzgrafenstein the first castle on the Middle Rhine adapted to artillery. Spanish troops held it from 1620 during the Thirty Years' War. The Baroque cap on the tower dates from 1714, and the present appearance from repairs after a fire in 1756. On New Year's Day 1814 Russian engineers built a pontoon bridge here over which Field Marshal Blücher's army of some 60,000 men crossed the Rhine in pursuit of Napoleon. Toll collection ended in 1867, after Nassau passed to Prussia.
Did you know? Pfalzgrafenstein is the lowest-lying medieval fortification on the Middle Rhine, standing on an island roughly 110 metres from one bank and 160 metres from the other.
04 Schwerin Castle
Schweriner Schloss
Germany · 1 km from Schwerin53.624° N 11.419° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
User:Kolossos · CC BY-SA 3.0 The setting is as much a part of the visit as the interiors: the palace stands next to the lake, with an extensive park beside it. Schwerin, the state capital, is a small city ringed by seven lakes, with a well-preserved old town, and is easily combined with the palace in a day.
Did you know? Gottfried Semper's 1843 rival design won high praise but was rejected, as were Demmler's earlier plans in the style of Windsor Castle.
05 Hohenzollern Castle
Burg Hohenzollern
Germany48.324° N 8.967° E
Image by jonathansautter from Pixabay The rebuilding costs were split, two-thirds to one-third, between the royal Prussian branch of the Hohenzollerns and the separate Swabian branch — an arrangement that shows the castle was always meant as shared dynastic property rather than one ruler's private folly. Both branches still have a stake in it today, which is part of why it functions as a working museum and occasional family venue rather than a purely public heritage site.
Did you know? The present castle is the third on the summit; the first, from the 11th century, was razed in 1423 after a siege of nearly a year by the Swabian cities.
06 Moritzburg Castle
Schloss Moritzburg
Germany · 14 km from Dresden51.168° N 13.680° E
Image by charlemagne from Pixabay The interiors are devoted to the hunt. Walls are hung with 17th-century gilded and painted leather, and the dining hall holds 71 red-deer trophies, among them what is described as the heaviest red-deer antler in the world, at 19.8 kg. The Feather Room holds a state bed and wall hangings woven from roughly a million peacock, pheasant, guinea-fowl and duck feathers for Augustus the Strong, back on view since 2003 after a restoration lasting 19 years. There are also porcelain rooms and Augsburg silver furniture. The castle was a filming location for the 1973 fairy-tale film Three Wishes for Cinderella, and hosts the annual Moritzburg Festival of chamber music.
Did you know? The feathers in the Feather Room were woven into the fabric as weft threads rather than glued on, work attributed to a Frenchman named Le Normand.
07 Burghausen Castle
Burg zu Burghausen
Germany48.156° N 12.829° E
C.Stadler/Bwag · CC BY-SA 4.0 The complex is Gothic in character and is laid out as a main castle with its inner courtyard, followed by five outer courtyards, defended by a succession of gates and towers, among them the Saint George's Gate of 1494 and the Powder Tower. The ducal residence in the main castle now houses the castle museum and a branch gallery of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, while the Kemenate holds the town museum. Below the ridge lies the old town of Burghausen in the Inn-Salzach style typical of the region, with its 14th–15th-century town hall and the parish church of St. Jakob.
Did you know? Excavations beneath the Dürnitz in 2002–2004 uncovered pottery from the 16th century BC, confirming that the ridge was settled in the Bronze Age.
08 Wartburg
Germany50.966° N 10.306° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by klausdie from Pixabay In 1817, German students gathered here to burn books they associated with reaction and foreign influence — an early flashpoint of German nationalism decades before unification. A century later, the same "most German of German castles" framing was picked up and put to darker use by the Nazi regime. Between Luther's ink, the minstrels' contest and the students' bonfire, this is a castle whose myths kept being borrowed by whoever needed a usable past.
Did you know? Saint Elisabeth of Hungary came to the castle aged four, to be raised as a future landgrave's wife; she died at 24 and was canonised within five years.
09 Eltz Castle
Burg Eltz
Germany · 24.8 km from Koblenz50.205° N 7.337° E
salomon10 from Germany · CC BY 2.0 Inside, the Rübenach and Rodendorf wings are open to visitors — a late Gothic banner hall with a vaulted ceiling, a Rübenach bedchamber with richly painted walls, and a treasury of gold, silver and porcelain, plus an armoury. The Kempenich third is still lived in by the family. The castle's portrait was familiar to every German between 1965 and 1992: it was engraved on the 500-Deutsche Mark note, and a path from the car park passes the very viewpoint used for the banknote.
Did you know? The treasury holds more than 500 objects from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries, including a Madonna attributed to Lucas Cranach the Elder.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful castles in Germany?
- On our list, Lichtenstein Castle ranks first, followed by Neuschwanstein Castle and Pfalzgrafenstein Castle.
- Who built Neuschwanstein Castle?
- Neuschwanstein was commissioned by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, with construction beginning in 1869. It was never fully completed, and Ludwig died in 1886, shortly after moving in.
- Why are there so many castles on the Rhine?
- The Rhine was a major trade route, and local lords built castles along it to control the river and collect tolls from passing ships. Pfalzgrafenstein, standing on an island in mid-river, was built specifically as a toll station.
- Which German castle has stayed in the same family the longest?
- Eltz Castle near the Moselle is famous for having been owned by the same family, the Eltz, for more than 800 years. It was never destroyed, which is rare among Rhineland castles.
- How many castles are on this list in Germany?
- The list covers 9 castles.