Best Castles in Bavaria

In 2025, UNESCO inscribed three of King Ludwig II’s palaces as a single World Heritage ensemble. Added to the Würzburg Residence, listed in 1981, that gives Bavaria four inscribed castle complexes — more than any other German state. The nine castles in this guide include all four. They also include five more whose stories explain how Bavaria came to have them in the first place: Hohenschwangau, where Romanticism caught the Bavarian throne; Marienberg, the medieval fortress the prince-bishops ruled Würzburg from for nearly five centuries before they built the Residence; Schloss Johannisburg, the Mainz Renaissance palace at Aschaffenburg that joined Bavaria only in 1814; Nuremberg Castle, the imperial Burg of the Holy Roman Empire that the Reichsstadt itself administered after 1427; and Mespelbrunn, the Spessart Wasserschloss that has stayed in one family’s hands since 1412.

Two Bavarias, mostly under one operator

Modern Bavaria is a political composite. The Wittelsbach dukes — and after 1806, kings — ruled from Munich and the Alpine south for over seven centuries. The three Franconian regions to the north, including the prince-bishopric of Würzburg, the prince-archbishopric of Mainz (which held Aschaffenburg as an exclave), the imperial Free City of Nuremberg, and the dense network of Franconian imperial-knight estates, were sovereign jurisdictions until secularization swept them into the Bavarian crown in 1803, with the 1814 Congress of Vienna confirming the new borders. What Bavaria inherited was a state with four distinct castle traditions inside its lines: the Wittelsbach royal-residential tradition centered in Munich and the Alps; the prince-bishop tradition that had ruled Franconia from the Marienberg, the Würzburger Residenz, and (for the Mainz electors) Schloss Johannisburg; the imperial-Reichsstadt tradition embodied by Nuremberg, where the burg and its custody of the imperial regalia made the Free City itself a kind of co-resident of the Empire; and the Reichsritter knightly tradition of the Spessart and Steigerwald, where families like the Echters of Mespelbrunn held their estates as direct vassals of the Empire rather than of any prince.

Eight of these nine castles share an operator that no other German state can match: the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung (BSV), Bavaria’s state palace administration. It absorbed the dissolved prince-bishopric residences in 1803 through secularization, took over the imperial Burg of Nuremberg in 1806 as part of the Reichsstadt’s mediatization, and then took on the Wittelsbach royal palaces in 1918 after the dynasty abdicated and the 1923 Wittelsbach Compensation Treaty turned their state-functional residences into public property. Two of the nine sit outside the BSV portfolio. Hohenschwangau was the family’s actual childhood home, not a state seat, and stayed with the family — held since 1923 by the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds. Mespelbrunn never passed through any state hand at all: the Echters and, since 1665, the Ingelheim family who married into them have held it continuously since 1412, and it is administered today by the family’s own Schlossverwaltung. The exceptions are editorially useful: they show where the institutional lines were drawn.

The nine at a glance

Nine castles, four architectural periods, four political traditions, nearly 700 years of building.

The four Wittelsbach castles cluster in the Alpine south, all within an hour or two of Munich. The five Franconian castles cluster in the north, anchored on Nuremberg, Würzburg, Aschaffenburg, and the Spessart between them. The map below traces a route across the four Wittelsbach palaces and the three principal Franconian seats; Nuremberg sits roughly between Würzburg and Munich, and Mespelbrunn lies in the Spessart forest twenty-two kilometers east of Aschaffenburg.

Hohenschwangau — where Romanticism caught Bavaria

Long before Neuschwanstein rose on the opposing crag, the Wittelsbach family already had a Schwangau castle. Crown Prince Maximilian — later King Maximilian II of Bavaria — bought the medieval ruin of Burg Schwanstein in 1832 and rebuilt it between 1833 and 1837 in the yellow neo-Gothic still visible today. The architect Domenico Quaglio II, working from designs by the stage painter Joseph Daniel Ohlmüller, gave the schloss its distinctive ochre walls and crenellated towers. It became the family’s summer residence for the next eighty years.

This is where Maximilian’s son, the future King Ludwig II, spent his childhood summers, looking up at the ruined Vorderhohenschwangau and Hinterhohenschwangau on the cliffs across the valley. Those ruins became the site he chose, decades later, for Neuschwanstein. The Hohenschwangau frescoes — more than ninety wall paintings designed in 1835 and 1836 by Moritz von Schwind and Ludwig Lindenschmit the Elder — set out the Germanic legend cycle (Lohengrin and the Swan Knight saga, the Nibelungenlied, scenes from the Norse Edda) that Ludwig II later commissioned Wagner to set to music and Christian Jank to translate into stone above the valley. The dream came from this house. For why Ludwig built as he did — the Wagner patronage, the lost sovereignty after 1871, and the architecture that answered it — see Ludwig II and the Architecture of Dreams.

Hohenschwangau is the only one of the seven castles in this guide not operated by the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung. Since 1923 it has been held by the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds, the foundation managing the residual assets of the former Bavarian royal family, and it is ticketed independently through the Ticket Center Hohenschwangau in the village below — typically as a same-day pairing with Neuschwanstein.

For the full account, see the Hohenschwangau Castle guide.

Neuschwanstein — the Wittelsbach apex

What started as a private retreat for one melancholic king became, after his death, the most famous castle in Europe. Ludwig II commissioned Neuschwanstein in 1869, with stage designer Christian Jank drawing the elevations and architects Eduard Riedel, Georg von Dollmann, and Julius Hofmann translating them into a buildable structure on the rock above the Pöllat gorge. Construction continued for the rest of his life and was halted, unfinished, when he was deposed and drowned in 1886.

The castle’s interiors are a Wagnerian iconographic program: the Singers’ Hall references Tannhäuser‘s medieval poetry contest at the Wartburg, the Throne Hall channels Byzantine sacred architecture in service of a hall the king never lived to use, and a small artificial stalactite grotto with colored lighting and a waterfall sits between the bedroom and the study — an interior fantasy landscape that prefigures the larger Venus Grotto at Linderhof. Within months of Ludwig’s death the Bavarian government opened the castle to the public to recoup costs; visitor revenues had repaid the construction debts in full by 1899. In 2025, UNESCO inscribed it as part of the Palaces of King Ludwig II of Bavaria ensemble.

Today the BSV admits roughly 1.4 million visitors annually under guided tours of approximately 35 minutes, and advance booking is essentially required from May through September. Construction scaffolding has been a near-permanent feature on at least one façade in recent years.

For the full account, see the Neuschwanstein Castle guide.

Linderhof — the only one Ludwig II finished

Linderhof is the smallest, the earliest completed, and the only one of King Ludwig II’s three great projects he saw finished in his lifetime. Begun in 1869 as a wooden hunting lodge in the Graswang valley above Ettal Abbey, it was redesigned in 1874 by Georg von Dollmann into the late-Baroque-fronted Neo-Rococo pavilion that stands today. The main building was completed by 1880; the surrounding park — terraces, the artificial Grotto of Venus, the Moroccan House, the Moorish Kiosk, the Hunding’s Hut after Die Walküre — continued until Ludwig’s death.

The interior is the densest French eighteenth-century quotation Ludwig produced. The Hall of Mirrors is sized for a single occupant rather than a court, and the king’s bed in the Royal Bedroom faces an audience chamber barred to actual visitors. Linderhof was where Ludwig actually lived in his last years, taking solitary walks at night through the illuminated gardens. Unlike Herrenchiemsee — which he commissioned to honor Louis XIV — Linderhof drew less from France than from the Wittelsbach inheritance on the king’s doorstep: the Amalienburg at Nymphenburg and the Rich Rooms of the Munich Residence, both designed in the 1730s by François de Cuvilliés the Elder.

The palace has remained in Bavarian state custody since 1918 and has never closed. UNESCO inscribed it in 2025 as a component of the Ludwig II ensemble.

For the full account, see the Linderhof Palace guide.

Herrenchiemsee — Versailles on a Bavarian lake

Ludwig II bought the largest island in the Chiemsee, the Herreninsel, in 1873 and began construction of his most ambitious palace there in 1878. The brief was explicit: an architectural homage to Louis XIV, conceived as a monument to absolute monarchy at exactly the historical moment Bavaria had stopped being one. Georg von Dollmann designed the central block as a meticulous quotation of the garden façade at Versailles; the interiors include a Hall of Mirrors that exceeds its French model in length, a State Bedroom modeled on Louis XIV’s, and a vast unfinished north wing that was never roofed.

The Versailles homage was not pastiche. The central block, the State Rooms, and the gardens were modeled directly on their Versailles counterparts, with the Großer Spiegelgalerie — at roughly 98 meters, deliberately longer than the 73-meter Hall of Mirrors at Versailles — exceeding its French model. He visited the building site only once during construction, in September 1885, less than a year before his death. Construction halted at his death the following year with the entire south wing and most of the north wing roofless. Eight years of construction, an unfinished palace either side of a tightly executed central core: Herrenchiemsee is the most expensive and most unfinished of his projects, and the BSV has preserved it deliberately in the state Ludwig left it.

The palace is reached from Prien am Chiemsee by ferry. UNESCO inscribed it in 2025 as a component of the Ludwig II ensemble.

For the full account, see the Herrenchiemsee New Palace guide.

Nuremberg Castle — the Reichsstadt’s imperial seat

Nuremberg Castle is the only castle in this guide that belonged neither to the Wittelsbachs nor to a prince-bishop. It was a Reichsburg — an imperial castle, owned by the Holy Roman Empire itself rather than by any territorial prince — and from the eleventh century onward it served as a working residence for the elected German kings and emperors when they came to the Franconian heartland for the imperial diets, court days, and coronations of their Reichsstadt host. Heinrich VI commissioned the Doppelkapelle between 1190 and 1196: a vaulted double chapel whose lower level served the imperial household and whose upper Kaiserkapelle, reached by a stair from the Palas, was reserved for the emperor. The Sinwellturm, the round watchtower, dates to the same Hohenstaufen building campaign.

Two later moments fixed Nuremberg’s place in the imperial constitution. In 1356, the Golden Bull of Charles IV decreed that every newly elected emperor must hold the first Reichstag of his reign at Nuremberg, making the Burg a permanent destination of the imperial court. In 1424, Sigismund of Luxembourg sent the Reichskleinodien — the imperial regalia, the crown jewels of the Empire — to the Reichsstadt’s keeping, where they remained until Napoleon’s troops took them in 1796. The Burg was no longer just a residence; it was the constitutional centerpiece of the Empire’s self-image. The Reichsstadt itself, after buying out the Hohenzollern burgraves’ last Franconian rights in 1427, administered the castle on behalf of the absent emperors for nearly four centuries.

The Reichsstadt lost its imperial freedom in the 1806 mediatization, when Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine assigned Nuremberg to the new Kingdom of Bavaria. The Wittelsbach crown took over the castle as a Bavarian state property, and it has been run by the BSV’s predecessors ever since. On the night of 2 January 1945, RAF Bomber Command’s area raid destroyed the Old Town and burned out almost every roof on the Burg; the Walpurgiskapelle and the Imperial Stables collapsed. Reconstruction under the Bavarian state ran from 1947 through 1965, with the permanent exhibition Kaiser – Reich – Stadt opening in the rebuilt Palas in 2013. The castle today is the most-visited fortress in southern Germany.

For the full account, see the Nuremberg Castle guide.

Marienberg — the prince-bishop’s hill

For 466 years, the prince-bishops of Würzburg ruled their city from the wrong side of the Main. From the wooded hill above the river’s left bank, the Festung Marienberg watched, weighed, and occasionally sent troops down the slope. The cathedral, the markets, and the burghers’ houses all stood across the water. Power lived on the hill. That arrangement — fortress facing city, prelate facing burghers — held from 1253, when the prince-bishops moved their permanent seat up from the cathedral close, until 1719, when Prince-Bishop Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn moved it down and across to the new Residenz.

The fortress is older than its tenure as a bishop’s seat. Its round Marienkirche dates from around 1000 and is one of the oldest surviving church buildings in Germany; the Höhenburg around it was first documented in 1201. Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn rebuilt the inner core in Renaissance form between 1573 and 1617, the most architecturally substantial single phase of the castle’s history. On 18 October 1631, a Swedish army stormed the fortress in the Thirty Years’ War — the first time it had been taken — and held it for four years; it was returned to the prince-bishopric in 1635 only by negotiation, not reconquest. The Schönborn prince-bishops added the Italian-school bastion ring (1649–1656) and the elegant Maschikuliturm (1724–1729), turning a high-medieval Burg into one of Germany’s most complete bastioned Festungen.

The Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung took over the fortress in 1933. As of 2026, much of the inner fortress is closed for individual visitors during a major restoration running through the early 2030s; the outer Echterhof, the Museum für Franken (a separate operator), and a BSV guided tour through the inner courtyard remain accessible.

For the full account, see the Marienberg Fortress guide.

Würzburg Residence — Tiepolo’s heaven on earth

In September 1719, Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn was elected Prince-Bishop of Würzburg and decided within months to abandon Marienberg. The medieval fortress on the hill could not host a Baroque court. He wanted a palace in the city, fronting a square large enough to drill a regiment in, designed by the best architect Germany then had — and he had one. Balthasar Neumann, an artillery officer turned architect from a family of Bohemian gunfounders, drew the plans in 1719–1720 and executed them, with corrections from Lukas von Hildebrandt, Maximilian von Welsch, Robert de Cotte, and Germain Boffrand, over the next two decades.

The result, completed structurally by 1744 and decoratively by ~1781, is the canonical statement of South German late Baroque: a 170-meter sandstone façade, a vestibule whose vaults are the most audacious staircase engineering of the eighteenth century, and a ceiling fresco by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo over the unsupported Treppenhaus vault — Apollo and the Four Continents, the largest contiguous unframed ceiling fresco in the world at roughly 600 square meters. The Hofkirche, the Spiegelkabinett, the Weißer Saal, and the Kaisersaal complete the central block. UNESCO inscribed the Residence and its court gardens in 1981 — the first castle in Bavaria to receive that designation, and one of the earliest German entries on the list.

The Residence was hit on the night of 16 March 1945 by RAF No. 5 Group — 225 Avro Lancaster bombers and eleven Mosquito Pathfinders — in a raid that delivered 1,127 tons of bombs in seventeen minutes. The roof and the eastern wing burned out; the central block survived because Neumann had built its staircase vault as a self-supporting masonry shell. Restoration ran from 1945 to 1987, and continues in detail.

For the full account, see the Würzburg Residence guide.

Schloss Johannisburg — the Mainz castle that joined Bavaria

Aschaffenburg was a Mainz town until 1814. Schloss Johannisburg, the four-towered red sandstone Renaissance palace on the right bank of the Main, was built between 1605 and 1614 by Prince-Archbishop-Elector Johann Schweikhard von Kronberg as a Mainz Zweitresidenz — a second residence for the Mainz electors when affairs called them away from Mainz itself. The architect Georg Ridinger of Strasbourg designed it as a strict Vierflügelanlage, four equal wings around a square inner court, with the late-Gothic Bergfried of the medieval predecessor castle preserved as a fifth tower. After the Mainz electorate was secularized in 1803, Aschaffenburg passed to Karl Theodor von Dalberg as Prince-Primate of the Confederation of the Rhine, then to the Grand Duchy of Frankfurt (also under Dalberg) in 1810, and on the dissolution of that grand duchy in 1814 to the Kingdom of Bavaria.

The Bavarian crown made the Schloss a Wittelsbach Nebensitz. King Ludwig I added the Pompejanum, his idiosyncratic full-scale reconstruction of the Roman House of the Dioscuri, on the bluff just upstream — the kind of cross-cultural quotation his grandson Ludwig II would later take to far stranger places. Inside the Schloss, the Schlosskapelle by Hans Juncker (high altar 1609–1613; pulpit 1618) survives as the building’s most important original art-historical interior, and the Staatsgalerie holds a major group of Lucas Cranach the Elder paintings.

American shells nearly erased the Schloss in the Battle of Aschaffenburg in March–April 1945. Reconstruction under the BSV ran from 1947 to 1968, with the chapel altar restoration completing in 1982. Today Johannisburg is jointly run by the BSV and the Stadt Aschaffenburg under separate ticketing.

For the full account, see the Schloss Johannisburg guide.

Mespelbrunn — the Echter cradle in the Spessart

Mespelbrunn is the only one of these nine castles that has never passed through any state hand. On 1 May 1412, Archbishop-Elector Johann II of Mainz granted a remote stretch of forest in the upper Spessart to a minor Mainz official named Hamann Echter — in allodial right rather than as a fief, with no village of consequence and no resource beyond timber. His son Hamann II Echter raised a fortified Burg on the dammed Elsava brook between 1427 and 1434, against the Hussite raids documented in the Spessart in those years; the round Bergfried rising from the moat today preserves the lower courses of that fifteenth-century tower. The castle’s most consequential generation was Peter III Echter and Gertraud von Adelsheim, who between 1551 and 1569 transformed the medieval Burg into the Renaissance Wasserschloss still standing — the stair-stepped gables, the inner courtyard portal dated 1569, the great hall (Rittersaal) finished by 1553. Their fourth son Julius, born here on 18 March 1545, became Prince-Bishop of Würzburg in 1573 and over forty-four years on the cathedra refounded its university, built the Juliusspital, and rebuilt or commissioned more than three hundred parish churches in the late-Gothic style now called Julius-Echter-Gotik.

The Echter male line ran out in 1665. Through a marriage in 1648 — the year of the Peace of Westphalia — the succession passed to the Ingelheim family, who were authorized by Emperor Leopold I to bear the joint surname Grafen von Ingelheim genannt Echter von und zu Mespelbrunn. The 1806 mediatization swept up the Reichsritter knightly territories of the Spessart along with everything else, and Mespelbrunn passed under Bavarian sovereignty in 1814 — but as a privately held country seat, not as a state property. Reichsgräfin Marie Antoinette von Ingelheim genannt Echterin von und zu Mespelbrunn, born in 1973, is in residence in the Südflügel today. From the 1412 grant to her tenure is six hundred and fourteen years of unbroken family possession on the same forty meters of moated platform, among the longest such tenures in Germany.

Mespelbrunn entered the wider German imagination through Kurt Hoffmann’s 1958 film Das Wirtshaus im Spessart, which used the castle as the seat of Graf Sandau. The moated Renaissance silhouette in the opening titles became, for a generation of West German viewers, the visual definition of the word Schloss. The family operates the castle as a private museum from late March to early November, with conservation campaigns co-funded by the Deutsche Stiftung Denkmalschutz handling the most exposed fabric in stages — the moat retaining wall in 2020, the chapel roof in 2022, and the Soldatenbrunnen and Chinese Salon in 2025.

For the full account, see the Mespelbrunn Castle guide.

Why Bavaria, and not somewhere else

What these nine castles share is not architectural language. The Marienberg’s bastion ring and Hohenschwangau’s neo-Gothic crenellations are separated by 250 years and by entirely different conceptions of what a castle is for; the imperial Burg of Nuremberg and the Spessart Wasserschloss of Mespelbrunn answer to different constitutional logics again. What they share is the institutional history that made them all, in the early twenty-first century, sit inside the same state and (mostly) under the same operator. Secularization in 1803 dissolved the Würzburg and Mainz prince-states and folded their buildings into the Bavarian crown. The 1806 mediatization assigned the imperial Reichsstadt of Nuremberg, with its Burg, to the new Kingdom of Bavaria, and absorbed the Hohenzollern Franconian principalities and the Reichsritter knightly estates of the Spessart along with it. The 1814 Congress of Vienna confirmed the borders. The 1918 abdication and the 1923 Compensation Treaty turned the Wittelsbach state-functional residences into public property — Linderhof, Herrenchiemsee, Neuschwanstein, the Munich Residence, the Würzburg Residence (already public since 1814), the Marienberg (added in 1933), and the Nuremberg Burg (held by the Bavarian state since 1806) all administered through what is now the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung, with more than forty sites under one umbrella.

The two visible exceptions reveal the rule. Hohenschwangau, as the Wittelsbach family’s actual childhood home rather than a state residence, stayed with the family — held since 1923 by the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds. Mespelbrunn never entered any state register at all: the Echters held it from 1412 and the Ingelheims who married into them have held it continuously to the present. State-functional palaces went public; the family’s own house stayed private; and the imperial-knight estate that was never a state seat in the first place stayed where it had always been.

Planning a Bavarian castle itinerary

Bavaria is large. Würzburg is roughly 270 km north of Munich; Aschaffenburg is another 75 km west of Würzburg; Nuremberg sits 170 km north of Munich and 100 km east of Würzburg, roughly between them. The Alpine four cluster within 100 km of each other south and southwest of Munich. A complete loop covering all nine is comfortably a week and a day.

The single most useful instrument is the BSV’s Mehrtagesticket: a 14-day combination pass valid at all seven BSV-operated sites in this guide and across the rest of the BSV portfolio, for a single price (€40 in 2026). The annual Jahreskarte (€55 single, €100 family) makes sense for travelers spending more than two weeks in the state. The Königsschlösser-Ticket bundles Linderhof, Neuschwanstein, and Herrenchiemsee at a discounted rate over a six-month window. Hohenschwangau is ticketed separately through the Ticket Center Hohenschwangau and is not covered by any BSV pass; Mespelbrunn is ticketed by the family’s own Schlossverwaltung, also outside the BSV system, and is cash-only at the gatehouse.

If a week-plus is the budget, the natural shape is two nights in Munich (day trips to Linderhof or Herrenchiemsee), two nights at Füssen for the Schwangau pair (Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau), one night in Nuremberg for the Burg and the Old Town, and two nights at Würzburg for the Residence and Marienberg, with Johannisburg as a half-day stop on the train back through Aschaffenburg and Mespelbrunn as a side-trip into the Spessart from there. If only a long weekend is available, the Schwangau pair plus one Munich-side palace is the most rewarding compression — and saves the Franconian five for a second trip, where they are properly the focus rather than the addendum.

Marienberg is partially closed for restoration through the early 2030s; the BSV guided fortress tour runs but most of the inner Festung is not currently accessible. Plan for the Museum für Franken on the same hill, which remains fully open under separate ticketing.

Conclusion

Nine castles, four architectural periods, four political traditions, one (mostly) unifying operator. Bavaria is the only German state where a single multi-day pass takes you from a twelfth-century Hohenstaufen Reichsburg to a 1886 Versailles homage on a lake — and the only place where the institutional shape of that itinerary is itself part of the story being told. This hub is one regional chapter in StoneKeep Atlas’s broader survey of Germany’s castle landscape. Readers focused on the Wittelsbach Romantic four can continue at The Castles of King Ludwig II, while readers drawn to how Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein fit into a wider stylistic moment can continue at The 19th-Century Romantic Revival of German Castles.

Beyond these nine, Bavaria has further substantial castles in the StoneKeep directory: Burghausen Castle, the world’s longest castle complex, on the Salzach. Still to come on StoneKeep Atlas: Nymphenburg Palace (the Wittelsbach summer residence in Munich), Coburg Veste (the Lutheran Franconian fortress), and the Plassenburg above Kulmbach. We’ll likely cover each of these in its own article in the months ahead.

Principal Sources

Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung. Amtliche Führer. Munich: Bayerische Verwaltung der staatlichen Schlösser, Gärten und Seen — separate official guidebook volumes for each BSV property.

Dehio, Georg. Handbuch der deutschen Kunstdenkmäler — Bayern III: Franken and Bayern IV: München und Oberbayern. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag — the standard German-language regional volumes covering all seven castles.

Hemmeter, Karlheinz. Bayerische Baudenkmäler im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Verluste, Schäden, Wiederaufbau. Munich: Bayerisches Landesamt für Denkmalpflege, 1995.

Hubala, Erich, and Otto Mayer. Die Würzburger Residenz: Bau und Bilderfindung. Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 1984.

Petzet, Michael. König Ludwig II. und die Kunst. Munich: Hirmer, 1968.

UNESCO World Heritage Centre. “Würzburg Residence with the Court Gardens and Residence Square” (Ref. 169, inscribed 1981) and “The Palaces of King Ludwig II of Bavaria” (Ref. 1726, inscribed 2025). whc.unesco.org.

Operator and institutional sources for this article include the Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung at schloesser.bayern.de; the Wittelsbacher Ausgleichsfonds via the Ticket Center Hohenschwangau at hohenschwangau.de; the Museum für Franken at museum-franken.de; and Schlösser- und Gartenverwaltung Aschaffenburg at schloesser-aschaffenburg.de.

Image credits. Hero (Neuschwanstein in winter, above the Alpsee): StoneKeep Atlas. Map (the nine Bavarian castles): StoneKeep Atlas (own work, rendered from coordinates via cairosvg). Hohenschwangau Castle from the Neuschwanstein ridge: Kora27, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Neuschwanstein Castle from the Marienbrücke: Diliff, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Linderhof Palace from the terrace gardens: © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung (photo: Maria Scherf / Andrea Gruber), used by permission via schlosslinderhof.de. Herrenchiemsee New Palace aerial: Carsten Steger, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Nuremberg Castle from the southwest in winter: DALIBRI, CC BY-SA 2.0 DE, via Wikimedia Commons. Marienberg Fortress from the Alte Mainbrücke: Strubbl, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Würzburg Residence Treppenhaus with Tiepolo’s Apollo and the Four Continents: © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg / Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung / Achim Bunz (CbDD), used by permission via residenz-wuerzburg.de. Schloss Johannisburg aerial from the east: © Bayerische Schlösserverwaltung, used by permission via schloesser.bayern.de. Schloss Mespelbrunn from across the moat: via Adobe Stock.