Dresden Castle

For almost four centuries the rulers of Saxony governed from this sprawling palace in the centre of Dresden, and its walls record nearly every chapter of that rule. Electors and later kings of the Albertine line of the House of Wettin lived here from the sixteenth century until 1918, and for much of the eighteenth century two of them were also kings of Poland. Today the building is better known for what it holds than for who lived in it: the treasure chambers of the Green Vault, the armoury with its Turkish Chamber, the coin cabinet and a vast collection of prints and drawings make it one of the richest museum complexes in Europe.

The palace grew out of a Romanesque keep from around 1200. The Hausmannsturm tower followed early in the fifteenth century, and between 1468 and 1480 the master builder Arnold von Westfalen enlarged the castle into a closed, four-winged block. A Saxon Renaissance building campaign in the mid-1500s gave it richly decorated courtyards, and after a fire in 1701 Augustus the Strong remodelled large parts in Baroque taste, creating in the western wing the mirrored, gilded rooms that became the Green Vault in the 1720s. A final Neo-Renaissance rebuilding around 1900 marked the 800th anniversary of the Wettin dynasty. On the outer wall of the Stallhof runs the Procession of Princes, a 102-metre parade of Saxon rulers on horseback, first painted by Wilhelm Walther and then transferred to Meissen porcelain tiles between 1904 and 1907 so that it would stop fading.

The bombing of Dresden on 13 February 1945 left most of the palace a roofless shell. Its treasures survived because they had been moved to Königstein Fortress, but the building itself stood as a ruin for years, and serious reconstruction only gathered pace in the late 1980s and after German reunification. Rebuilding the courtyards, halls and state rooms room by room has taken decades, and the return of the Historic Green Vault in 2006 was one of the milestones. The palace sits in Dresden's old town beside the Zwinger, the Semperoper and the Catholic Court Church, the core of the Baroque city on the Elbe that the Saxon court made famous.

Getting there

The palace stands in the historic centre of Dresden. Dresden Airport (DRS) lies about 9 km to the north, with a suburban rail link into the city. Dresden Hauptbahnhof, the city's main railway station, is a short tram ride or walk to the south.