Heidelberg Castle

Heidelberg Castle is the most famous ruin in Germany, a vast palace hanging on the wooded slope of the Königstuhl about 80 metres above the old town and the River Neckar. It is counted among the most important Renaissance buildings north of the Alps. A castle here is first recorded in 1214, when the Wittelsbach duke Louis I received it from Emperor Frederick II; by 1303 there were two, and the upper one was destroyed by lightning in 1537. The lower castle became the residence of the Electors Palatine, among the most powerful princes of the Empire, and they built it out wing by wing. The Ottheinrich Wing is a landmark of German Renaissance architecture; the Friedrich Wing of 1601-1607, by the architect Johannes Schoch with statues of the electors' ancestors by the sculptor Sebastian Götz, has the court chapel on its ground floor; and for Frederick V and his English bride Elizabeth Stuart the engineer Salomon de Caus laid out the Hortus Palatinus from 1610, a terraced garden that contemporaries called the eighth wonder of the world.

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. Romantic writers and painters then fell in love with the ruin: J. M. W. Turner painted it repeatedly, Victor Hugo wandered through it in 1838, and Mark Twain wrote about it in A Tramp Abroad. The French émigré Charles de Graimberg appointed himself its guardian, documented it and promoted it, and is credited with saving it. In 1890 an expert commission decided the castle should be preserved as a ruin rather than rebuilt; only the Friedrich Wing was restored, in 1897-1900, by Carl Schäfer.

That decision shaped what visitors see today: roofless facades with empty windows, the split Fat Tower, and terraces with the classic view over the old town and the river. In the cellar is the Heidelberg Tun, a wine barrel built in 1751 that holds about 219,000 litres and has a dance floor built on top of it; the court jester Perkeo, who legend says guarded the castle's wine, keeps watch beside it. The German Apothecary Museum, here since 1957, fills eleven rooms of the Ottheinrich Wing, the Ludwig Wing and the Apothecary Tower with complete historic pharmacies from the Renaissance to the 1930s, painted glass, majolica and old remedies.

Getting there

The castle is about 2 km from Heidelberg's city centre, directly above the old town. It has its own station on the Heidelberger Bergbahn funicular, which runs from Kornmarkt in the old town up to the Königstuhl; you can also walk up by steep lanes and steps. The nearest airport is Mannheim City (MHG), about 16 km away, a small airfield; check what flights it offers. Heidelberg has had a railway connection since 1840.