BacharachStahleck
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.
- Place
- Bacharach
- Chainage
- rkm 543
- Built
- early 12th c.; blown up 1689; rebuilt 1909–1935
- Condition
- Rebuilt; youth hostel
- Owner
- Deutsches Jugendherbergswerk (leasehold)
- Protection
- Within the Upper Middle Rhine Valley World Heritage Site (inscribed 2002)
Early holders
Goswin von Falkenburg appears in charters of 1120–21 and is named in 1135 as Cozwinus de Staelechae, which gives the site one of the earlier documented lordships on this stretch of river. The castle guarded Bacharach and its toll.
The moat
Stahleck has a partly water-filled moat, which is genuinely unusual for a German hill castle: the section that holds water measures about 18 by 13 m and served as a cistern as much as an obstacle. On a dry ridge, a reliable water supply is worth more than another ditch.
Thirty Years' War
The castle was besieged, taken and sacked eight times during the war. Spanish troops held it from October 1620; Swedish troops took it in January 1632. French forces occupied it in 1644 and left in 1650, after which it decayed.
On 15 March 1689, in the War of the Palatine Succession, French engineers blew it up. The ring wall and the keep were completely destroyed.
Twentieth-century rebuilding
Consolidation of the ruin began in 1909. Construction of a youth hostel started in 1925 and the building was dedicated on 12–13 June 1926; work continued through the 1930s, with the rebuilt palas dedicated on 25 October 1935. The hostel now has 168 beds and runs at roughly 42,000 overnight stays a year, which is to say it is almost always full.
The silhouette from the river is a 1930s composition. It is a good composition, but it is not a medieval one.