Moritzburg Castle

Moritzburg is the Baroque hunting palace of the electors of Saxony, set on a symmetrical artificial island in the middle of a lake in the woods north of Dresden. Four round corner towers rise straight out of the water, and with the reflecting pond and the long avenues of the surrounding forest the whole ensemble reads as a single designed landscape. The forests and ponds here were a favourite hunting ground of the Saxon electors and kings.

The first building was a hunting lodge put up in 1542–46 for Duke Moritz of Saxony, who gave the place its name. Elector John George II enlarged it and added the chapel in 1661–71, designed by Wolf Caspar von Klengel. The present palace is the work of Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, who between 1723 and 1733 had it remodelled as a country seat by his architects Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann and Zacharias Longuelune. Several small ponds were merged into the large lake around the island, and a French-style garden and game preserve were laid out. Later in the century the Little Pheasant Castle, a Rococo pavilion with Chinese touches, was built about 2.5 km to the east, together with a toy harbour, jetty and lighthouse where naval battles were staged for the court. The last Wettin to live here was Prince Ernst Heinrich, expropriated in 1945.

The interiors are devoted to the hunt. Walls are hung with 17th-century gilded and painted leather, and the dining hall holds 71 red-deer trophies, among them what is described as the heaviest red-deer antler in the world, at 19.8 kg. The Feather Room holds a state bed and wall hangings woven from roughly a million peacock, pheasant, guinea-fowl and duck feathers for Augustus the Strong, back on view since 2003 after a restoration lasting 19 years. There are also porcelain rooms and Augsburg silver furniture. The castle was a filming location for the 1973 fairy-tale film Three Wishes for Cinderella, and hosts the annual Moritzburg Festival of chamber music.

Getting there

The palace is in the village of Moritzburg, about 7 km from Radebeul and about 14 km from central Dresden. The Lößnitzgrundbahn, a steam-hauled narrow-gauge railway, runs year-round from Radebeul Ost station on the Dresden–Meissen line to Moritzburg. The nearest airport is Dresden Airport (DRS), about 7 km away.