Château de Tarascon is the river fortress of Good King René, and one of the best-preserved medieval castles in France. The Angevin princes who raised it on the left bank of the Rhône built both a stronghold and a residence, a working castle on the frontier of Provence facing the rival fortress of Beaucaire across…
The island fortress off Marseille that never fired a shot, made the world’s most famous prison by Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo.
Frankenstein Castle near Darmstadt is a real 13th-century knights’ ruin in Hesse, with a documented history quite unlike the Mary Shelley legend.
Heidelberg Castle is one of the most important Renaissance ruins north of the Alps. Built by the Wittelsbach Electors Palatine from the thirteenth century, it was devastated by French forces in the 1689 and 1693 and sealed as a ruin by lightning in 1764.