Location: Schwangau, Bavaria Map
Tel: (08362) 811 27
Open: Apr- Sep Fri- Wed 9 am- 6 pm; Thu 9 am- 8 pm
Oct- Mar 10 am- 4 pm
The castle of Hohenschwangau was build here by knights in the Middle Ages. Hohenschwangau Castle was first mention in the chronicles of the 12th century. However through its long history and numerous conflicts the castle feel in disrepair and was eventually abandoned. Maximilian II of Bavaria found the ruins of the old citadel and rebuilt the castle in neo- Gothic style. His son, future king Ludwig II grew up here and later build a Neuschwanstein just few miles from Hohenschwangau. Both castles add a sense of fairytale to this beautiful landscape.
A "Castrum Swangowe" was
mentioned for the first time in 1090. However, this meant the double
castles of Vorder- and Hinterschwangau, the ruins of which stood on
the rock there until Neuschwanstein Castle was built: the elongated
front part was where it is today the hall stands, the rear one,
separated by a ditch, stood as a keep between today's knight's house
and kemenate, where the neo-Gothic keep was planned, which was not
built. The Lords of Schwangau lived on this double castle as
ministerials of the Welfs. With the death of Welf VI. In 1191 the
Guelph property in Swabia fell to the Staufers, with the death of
Konradin in 1268 to the empire. The Knights of Schwangau then
continued to rule as a direct imperial fief until they died out in
1536.
The most famous Schwangau was the minstrel Hiltbolt von
Schwangau (* approx. 1190–1256); 22 minne songs from him have been
preserved, the dates of which are set between 1215 and 1225, which
have found their way into the Heidelberger and partly into the
Weingartner song manuscript. Margareta von Schwangau was the wife of
the minstrel Oswald von Wolkenstein. When Duke Rudolf IV of Austria
brought Tyrol under Habsburg rule in 1363, Stephan von Schwangau and
his brothers undertook to keep their fortresses Vorder- and
Hinterschwangau, Frauenstein Castle and the Sinwellenturm open to
the Austrian Duke. A document from 1397 mentions the Schwanstein,
today's Hohenschwangau Castle, for the first time, which - less
fortified but easier to reach - was built below the older double
castle on a hill above the Alpsee.
After Ulrich von Schwangau
had divided his rule over four sons in 1428, the once proud family
of the Lords of Schwangau experienced a steady downward trend:
Mismanagement and inheritance disputes led Georg von Schwangau to
his inheritance, the Hohenschwangau castles and the Frauenstein, in
1440 Jurisdiction to Duke Albrecht III. sold by Bayern-Munich.
However, the Schwangau residents stayed on site as the keepers of
the dukes of Bavaria. In 1521 the two brothers Heinrich and Georg
von Schwangau were enfeoffed again with their property by Emperor
Karl V at the Reichstag in Worms, but in 1535 they had to sell it to
the imperial councilor Wolf Haller von Hallerstein for 35,000
florins acted as a straw man for the bourgeois Augsburg patrician
Johann Paumgartner and immediately passed on the imperial rule to
him. In 1536 the two brothers died as the last of their sex.
Johann Paumgartner was adviser and financier of the emperor Charles V, who ennobled him to imperial baron in 1537, after which he called himself Paumgartner von Hohenschwangau zum Schwanstein. He had the neglected Schwanstein Castle restored by Italian craftsmen as the center of his new rule, while Vorderhohenschwangau and Frauenstein continued to fall into disrepair. The architect Lucio di Spazzi, who had already worked on the Innsbruck Hofburg and on the bridge fortress Altfinstermünz, used the existing building fabric, retained the outer walls with crenellated crowns and towers, but redesigned the interior for contemporary living requirements, using the current floor plan with the in Regular grouping of three suites of rooms on either side of a continuous central fleece, identical on all floors. He put a wreath of bastions around the residential building. In 1547 the construction work was completed. In 1549 Paumgartner died and the rule fell to his two sons David and Georg, who got into debt. In 1561 David Paumgartner pledged the imperial rule to Margrave Georg-Friedrich of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, who sold it to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria in 1567. This also brought the claims of Paumgartner's creditors and was enfeoffed with Hohenschwangau under imperial law. In 1604, Duke Max I of Bavaria received the entitlement to the imperial fiefs associated with Hohenschwangau, Elector Ferdinand Maria of Bavaria in 1670 himself.
The castle was used for bear hunting or was left to the later sons of the Wittelsbach electors. With the Thirty Years' War the castle began to fall into disrepair again; in the War of the Austrian Succession it was plundered by the Austrians in 1743, but was repaired by the court building department as the seat of the care court. After the new office building was built in 1786, it fell into disrepair. It was not until 1803 that the Hohenschwangau Reichslehen was incorporated into the Electorate of Bavaria through the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, which rose to become the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1805. During the coalition wars from 1800 to 1809, the castle was used as quarters for French and Austrian troops and after a brief but unsuccessful bombardment and siege by the French, the last hour seemed to have struck for the castle: in 1820 it was converted under King Maximilian I. 200 guilders sold to a local resident for demolition. Prince Ludwig von Oettingen-Wallerstein, whose family had owned the Sankt Mang monastery in nearby Füssen since 1802, heard about the intended destruction in 1821 and bought the castle for 225 guilders in order to save it. He was enthusiastic about the location of the castle, which was situated in the most charming landscape like on a panoramic stage. The prince had repair and security measures carried out, but sold the castle again in 1823 after he had married morganatically and lost his position as head of the family. The next owner, the geodesist Johann Adolph Sommer, intended to set up a flax spinning mill in the castle, but this did not happen.
Around this time, the Bavarian King Ludwig I decided to
give his son, Crown Prince Maximilian, the high castle of Füssen,
the former summer residence of the Augsburg bishops, as his
residence. He therefore went to Füssen in 1829 and went on a hike
from there to the Tyrolean Reutte, where he came through
Hohenschwangau. The Crown Prince was immediately enchanted by the
historic building and its incomparable location between Alpsee and
Schwansee. He renounced Hohenfüssen and, after three years of
purchase negotiations, acquired Schwanstein Castle in 1832, which he
renamed Hohenschwangau Castle. This swapped the names of Schwanstein
Castle and the older double castles Vorder- and
Hinterhohenschwangau. The former is now called Hohenschwangau, the
latter Neuschwanstein.
Crown Prince Max had the palace
rebuilt in the neo-Gothic style by the architecture and theater
painter Domenico Quaglio (1787–1837) until 1837. The construction
project, like the city residence of the Crown Prince, the
Wittelsbacher Palais, was in stark contrast to the official
conception of art in Bavaria, which was characterized by classicism,
neo-humanism and philhellenism, in the Bavaria of Ludwig I.
Significantly, he made the painter Quaglio the chief construction
manager and assigned the architect Georg Friedrich to him Ziebland
only at. Quaglio, who was inexperienced in building construction,
was so exhausted that he died shortly before the construction was
completed. The work was continued by the Munich architect Joseph
Daniel Ohlmüller. In 1842 the Crown Prince married Princess Marie of
Prussia, whereupon new rooms and outbuildings were set up. Almost at
the same time as the renovation of Hohenschwangau, from 1836 to
1842, Marie's cousin, the Crown Prince and, since 1840, Prussian
King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who was married to Max's aunt Elisabeth
Ludovika of Bavaria, had Stolzenfels Castle on the Rhine again in a
similar style let build up.
In 1848 Max ascended the throne
as Maximilian II, new wings were built for the court, most recently
the cavalier's building in 1855. The palace served the royal family
as a summer residence and was the nursery of the two sons, the later
kings Ludwig II and Otto. Her mother Marie von Bayern (1825–1889)
often went on mountain hikes with them, including the old castles of
Vorder- and Hinterhohenschwangau and Frauenstein. Even after the
death of King Max II in 1864, she spent several summer months here
every year. In her absence, Ludwig II also frequently used the
castle, including during the construction of his own Neuschwanstein
Castle from 1869 to 1884, which until 1886 was officially named Neue
Burg Hohenschwangau. Ludwig II did not change anything in
Hohenschwangau except his own bedroom, in which he had a group of
rocks built in 1864, over which a waterfall flowed, as well as an
apparatus for generating an artificial rainbow and a night sky with
moon and stars, which is visible from the upper floor through a
complicated system of mirrors were illuminated from. After Ludwig's
death in 1886, Queen Marie had the room restored to its original
condition. She died almost three years after the death of her son in
1889 at Hohenschwangau Castle.
The castle has belonged to the Wittelsbach Compensation Fund and is used as a museum since 1923. At the same time, however, it is occasionally available to members of the Wittelsbach family for stays or celebrations. Prince Adalbert of Bavaria retired to Hohenschwangau Castle in 1941 after he had left the Wehrmacht as "unworthy of defense" through the so-called Prince's Decree.
Today's
Hohenschwangau Castle was built into the partially preserved outer
walls of Schwanstein Castle from the 14th century between 1537 and
1547. The four-storey complex of the main building, which was
redesigned in a neo-Gothic style both inside and out from 1833–1837,
with a yellow facade, has three round towers with polygonal
superstructures, the gate building is three-storey.
Today
there is a museum in the main building. The interior furnishings
from the Biedermeier period have been preserved unchanged. The rooms
are still furnished with the furnishings from the restoration
period.
The rooms were painted according to designs by Moritz
von Schwind and Ludwig Lindenschmit the Elder. The executors
included both the latter and his brother Wilhelm Lindenschmit the
Elder. The more than ninety murals were executed between 1835 and
1836 and deal with themes from the history of the castle and
Schwangau as well as from medieval heroic sagas, namely the saga of
the Swan Knight Loherangrîn in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Middle High
German verse epic Parzival (Richard Wagner's 1850 in his opera
Lohengrin processed), the Nibelungen saga and the Edda. One of the
frescoes takes up a local folk tradition according to which
Christoph von Langenmantel brought Martin Luther from Augsburg to
Hohenschwangau to protect him in 1518.
The castle has been
preserved in the condition described to this day. Some projects such
as the construction of a drawbridge and several towers on the
curtain wall were no longer carried out; a high keep was started in
1851, but demolished the following year as it threatened to become
expensive and King Max did not like it.
In the valley floor
on the north side below the castle is the Schwanseepark, which
originally belonged to the castle and is now heavily overgrown. The
park was laid out according to plans by Peter Joseph Lenné.
The Grand Hotel Alpenrose was built in the 19th century on the site
of the official building, which was built in 1786, and the Museum of
the Bavarian Kings was opened in 2011 by the Wittelsbach
Compensation Fund. This shows around 160 original exhibits from the
Middle Ages to the present day. The core of the museum is the Hall
of the Kings, in which the builders of Hohenschwangau and
Neuschwanstein, Max II and Ludwig II, are the subject. Since spring
2019, the Alpenrose has also been home to the Alpenrose am See
Restaurant & Café and 14 hotel rooms of the AMERON Neuschwanstein
Alpsee Resort & Spa of the Althoff Hotels Group.