Upper Middle Rhine Valley Forty castles in sixty-five kilometres
Between the Bingen Gate and Koblenz the Rhine cuts a gorge some 65 km long, and along it stand the densest concentration of medieval castles anywhere in Europe. This site lists them, one page each, with the evidence for the dates.
The valley was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2002 under criteria (ii), (iv) and (v), with a property area of 27,250 hectares and a buffer zone of a further 34,680. The inscription covers the stretch from the Binger Pforte, where the river enters the gorge, north to Koblenz.
Roughly forty hill castles were built along it. Two were never destroyed. Most of the rest were slighted within a decade either side of 1689, and a substantial number of those were rebuilt in the nineteenth century as something rather different from what had stood before. Sorting out which is which is the point of this register.
From the register
Marksburg
The only hill castle in the gorge that was never reduced to a ruin — which makes it, awkwardly, both the most informative and the least typical building on this list.
Pfalzgrafenstein
A customs post built on a rock in the middle of the river, and the clearest surviving demonstration of what the Rhine castles were actually for.
Rheinfels
The largest fortress between Koblenz and Mainz, and the only one on the Rhine that defeated a full French siege — before being demolished by the French a century later.
Rheinstein
The first of the romantic reconstructions, and therefore the building that set the template for how the nineteenth century thought a Rhine castle ought to look.
Stahleck
Eight times taken in the Thirty Years' War, destroyed in 1689, and rebuilt in the 1920s as a hostel — a building that has been demolished and re-imagined more thoroughly than any other in the gorge.
Stolzenfels
A Gothic Revival palace on a medieval footprint, and the most complete surviving statement of Prussian romantic taste on the river.
Recent field notes
Walking the Oberwesel wall
Sixteen towers, an afternoon, and a note on where the circuit is actually legible.
The Rheinfels mine galleries
Take a torch. This is not optional advice.
Getting to Pfalzgrafenstein in March
The ferry is a function of the river, not of the timetable.