Sankt GoarRheinfels
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.
- Place
- Sankt Goar
- Chainage
- rkm 556
- Built
- from 1245
- Condition
- Extensive ruin; museum, hotel
- Owner
- Town of Sankt Goar
- Protection
- Within the Upper Middle Rhine Valley World Heritage Site (inscribed 2002)
Foundation and growth
Count Diether V of Katzenelnbogen began the castle in 1245 to control the toll at Sankt Goar. What started as a conventional hill castle was extended repeatedly through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a bastioned fortress that dwarfed everything else in the gorge.
The great vaulted cellar was arched over in 1587–1589 and is still described as the largest self-supporting vaulted cellar in Europe. In peacetime the works housed between three and six hundred people; under siege conditions the figure given in the older literature is up to four and a half thousand.
Mines and countermines
The most rewarding part of the site today is not the standing masonry but the network of mine galleries cut under the outer defences, designed so that a besieger who took the glacis could be blown out of it. Sections are open and lit; other sections are not, and the difference matters.
Slighting
The fortress was slighted by French revolutionary troops in 1797. Through the following decades the ruin served as a quarry for building stone, which removed rather more of it than the demolition had. What stands now is perhaps a third of the seventeenth-century extent.
Present state
A museum occupies the better-preserved buildings, and a hotel and restaurant occupy part of the upper works. The outer circuit is freely walkable and repays an unhurried afternoon; take a torch for the galleries.