Herrenchiemsee Palace
Neues Schloss Herrenchiemsee
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- About 16.6 million marks were spent on Herrenchiemsee, more than Linderhof and Neuschwanstein together, pushing the royal finances close to bankruptcy.
- The dining room has a table on a lift and what is described as the world's largest Meissen porcelain chandelier.
- Unlike the original Versailles, Ludwig's palace had running water, toilets, central heating and a large heated bathtub.
- The ceiling of the Hall of Mirrors carries 25 paintings that celebrate Louis XIV, the king Ludwig revered.
- Ludwig's first trip to France in 1867 was cut short before he could see Versailles; he finally visited in 1874 and was received with honours on his birthday.
- The project was first planned for the Graswang valley near Ettal, the site where Ludwig later built Linderhof Palace instead.
- Before Ludwig bought the island in 1873, a Württemberg timber company was planning to clear its forest entirely.
- After the abbey was dissolved, later owners pulled down its cathedral and even turned the monastery buildings into a brewery.
- Recent research suggests the island's monastery may date to the 620s, which would make it the oldest in the early Duchy of Bavaria.
- From 1215 the island church served as the cathedral of its own small diocese, the Bishopric of Chiemsee, until the diocese was dissolved in 1808.
Why it is worth it
On an island in the Chiemsee in southern Bavaria, King Ludwig II of Bavaria tried to build his own Versailles. The New Palace of Herrenchiemsee was his homage to Louis XIV, the Sun King he admired: a formal garden with fountains, including a copy of the Latona Fountain, leads to a long Baroque-style façade, and inside, a grand staircase modelled on the vanished Ambassadors' Staircase of Versailles opens onto a sequence of state rooms. Its showpiece is the Hall of Mirrors, 75 metres long, with 17 arches like its French model, 33 chandeliers and 44 candelabra; it is slightly longer than the original, flanked as at Versailles by a Hall of Peace and a Hall of War.
Ludwig bought the Herreninsel in 1873, and building began on 21 May 1878 to designs by Georg von Dollmann, with Christian Jank and Franz von Seitz. The state bedroom, conceived as a ceremonial room after Louis XIV's own, was finished by 1881. Money ran out, and when the king died in 1886 only the central section stood, with 50 of the planned 70 rooms unfinished. Ludwig spent just a few days here, in September 1885. The incomplete north wing was pulled down in 1907, and empty rooms in the south wing have housed a museum devoted to the king since 1987.
The island had a long life before Ludwig. An Augustinian monastery stood here until it was secularised in 1803, and its buildings, known as the Old Palace, still stand on the island. In August 1948 they hosted the constitutional convention that drafted the groundwork for West Germany's Basic Law. Together with Ludwig's other palaces, Herrenchiemsee was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2025. The neighbouring smaller island, Frauenchiemsee, lies a short distance across the water.
Getting there
The island can be reached only by boat; ferries run from Prien am Chiemsee, which has a railway station on the Munich–Salzburg line. Traunreut, the nearest town by straight line, is about 18 km away. The nearest airport is Salzburg Airport (SZG) in Austria, about 46 km away; the nearest German one is Munich Airport (MUC), about 72 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Herrenchiemsee is a complex of royal buildings on Herreninsel, the largest island in the Chiemsee lake, in southern Bavaria, Germany. Together with the neighbouring isle of Frauenchiemsee and the uninhabited Krautinsel, it forms the municipality of Chiemsee, located about 60 kilometres (37 mi) southeast of Munich in the district of Rosenheim.
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