Hohenzollern Castle
Burg Hohenzollern
Interesting facts
- From 1952 to 1991 the coffins of the Prussian kings Frederick William I and Frederick the Great rested in the castle chapel, returning to Potsdam only after German reunification.
- 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.
- 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.
- For all its imperial pedigree, none of the three German Kaisers ever lived here; the rebuilt castle served chiefly as a dynastic showpiece.
- The Prussian flag goes up over the castle only when the head of the house is in residence; at other times it flies the colours of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen.
- A magnitude 5.7 earthquake in September 1978 brought down several of its turrets, and the repairs went on until the mid-1990s.
- The treasury keeps the Prussian crown made for Wilhelm II, along with a uniform that once belonged to Frederick the Great.
- The fortified approach was designed by Moritz von Prittwitz, Prussia's leading fortification engineer: past the drawbridge of the Eagle Gate, the ramp doubles back four times before reaching the bastions.
- The castle stands on an isolated outlier of the Swabian Jura, 855 metres above sea level and some 234 metres above the town of Hechingen.
- Medieval sources already admired the first castle on this hill, calling it the crown of all the castles in Swabia.
Why it is worth it
By the time Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm visited the hilltop in 1819, the medieval and early-modern castles that had stood there were mostly gone — only the chapel had really survived intact. What he commissioned decades later, once he was king, wasn't a restoration of a lost family seat so much as the construction of a brand-new castle meant to look like the ancestral one should have looked: a physical monument to Hohenzollern dynastic identity, built on Romantic nostalgia rather than any surviving building to repair.
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.
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.
Getting there
3 km from Hechingen. Stuttgart Airport (STR) is about 45 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Lichtenstein Castle 23.4 km · castle
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Hohenzollern Castle is the ancestral seat of the formerly imperial House of Hohenzollern. The third of three hilltop castles built on the site, it is located atop Mount Hohenzollern, above and south of Hechingen, on the edge of the Swabian Jura in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The name derives from Söller (terrace), from the Latin solarium.
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