OberweselSchönburg
An imperial castle wrecked in 1689 and partly raised again from 1885 by an American collector with an ancestral interest in the name.
- Place
- Oberwesel
- Chainage
- rkm 550
- Built
- early 12th c.; destroyed 1689
- Condition
- Part ruin, part rebuilt; hotel
- Owner
- Town of Oberwesel; leased
- Protection
- Within the Upper Middle Rhine Valley World Heritage Site (inscribed 2002)
Imperial castle
The Schönburg began as an imperial castle in the early twelfth century and is recorded in 1149 in the hands of Hermann von Stahleck. It passed subsequently to Magdeburg and then to the Electorate of Trier, and was for a long period held in shares by several families at once — an arrangement that produced the unusually compartmented plan.
Destruction and revival
French troops destroyed the castle in 1689 during the Nine Years' War, and it lay ruined for nearly two centuries. From 1885 T. J. Oakley Rhinelander of New York began a partial reconstruction, starting with the lookout corner and the southern residential range.
From the 1950s the southern part was fitted out as a hotel and the northern part as a youth centre of the Kolping Society. Both uses continue.
The town below
Oberwesel is worth as much time as the castle. It retains the best-preserved town wall anywhere in the gorge — laid out in the early thirteenth century, strengthened in the fourteenth, with sixteen surviving towers. The Ochsenturm, a butter-churn tower with an octagonal upper stage and crenellation, is the landmark; the Katzenturm and the Steingassenturm are the more instructive.