Königstein Fortress

Königstein Fortress crowns a sandstone table mountain 240 metres above the Elbe in Saxon Switzerland, one of the largest hilltop fortifications in Europe. The plateau covers 9.5 hectares and is ringed by a rampart walk of about 1.8 km, where masonry up to 42 metres high merges with sheer natural rock faces. More than fifty buildings stand inside, some over four centuries old, and from the walls the view reaches across the Elbe to the Lilienstein and the other flat-topped rocks of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.

A castle on the rock is first recorded in 1233, when the area belonged to the Kingdom of Bohemia; it passed to the Margraves of Meissen in the 15th century. The oldest surviving building is the castle chapel from around 1200. Between 1563 and 1569 a well was driven 152.5 metres into the rock, still the deepest in Saxony, and from 1589 Elector Christian I turned the hill into Saxony's strongest fortress, surrounding it with walls and adding the gatehouse, the Old Barracks, the Old Armoury and the Christiansburg pleasure pavilion, later called the Friedrichsburg. The Johann-Georgenburg with its Renaissance arcades of 1605, the Magdalenenburg, and a bastion by Wolf Caspar von Klengel followed in the 17th century. Under Augustus the Strong, coopers built a giant wine cask in the Magdalenenburg cellar holding almost 250,000 litres.

The fortress was never taken by force. Its role was more as a refuge for the Saxon court, a treasury in wartime (Dresden's art collections were hidden here in 1756 and 1813) and, above all, a feared state prison. Its inmates included Johann Friedrich Böttger, co-inventor of European porcelain, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and the Social Democrat August Bebel. In the Second World War it held Allied officers as Oflag IV-B, and in 1942 the French general Henri Giraud escaped from it. The only man known to have climbed its walls was a chimney sweep, Sebastian Abratzky, in 1848; his route is still a graded climb today.

Since 1955 the fortress has been an open-air museum of military history, now run as a branch of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, with exhibitions in the barracks, armouries and treasure house. A panoramic lift built in 2005 carries visitors up the outer wall.

Getting there

The fortress stands above the small town of Königstein; Pirna is about 10 km away and Dresden Airport (DRS) about 31 km. S-Bahn line S1 from Meissen and Dresden stops at Königstein station, about 25 minutes' walk from the fortress; from April to October a small road train, the Festungsexpress, runs between the town, the car park and the gate. Buses 241 and 246 from Pirna stop at "Am Königstein", a few minutes' walk away.