10 Castles That Shouldn't Be Real

Here's 10 castles that look like they belong in a fantasy movie. Let's start with number 10, Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany. Sitting on a hilltop above a village in the Bavarian Alps, surrounded by forest, overlooking a gorge with a waterfall, and framed against a backdrop of alpine peaks, is the most famous castle in the world. It is also, in a sense, the most fictional. Because it wasn't built for defense, it wasn't built for governance or any practical military political purpose that the castles are traditionally built for, it was built for fantasy as a stage set. It's a fully inhabitable illustration of the medieval world as imagined by the 19th century king, who preferred his fairy tales to politics and opera to governance. The king was Ludwig II of Bavaria, known to history as Mad King Ludwig, a title that's neither entirely fair nor entirely inaccurate. Ludwig wasn't clinically insane, he was reclusive, eccentric, and obsessively devoted to the music of Richard Wagner, whose operas, with their themes of medieval knights and enchanted forests, provided the aesthetic template for this castle. Ludwig retreated into his castles, and Neuschwanstein, which he began building in 1869, was the most ambitious and most expensive. The castle was designed by a theatrical set designer, Christian Junck, who created the exterior appearance, not as an architect, but as a painter, producing these romantic illustrations of a medieval castle that was, when translated into plans by the architect, the result is a building that looks from every angle like a painting. The towers are a bit too tall, the turrets are too numerous, the roof lines are way too dramatic, and the overall silhouette, the vertical and possibly romantic profile, is the silhouette of a dream rather than a building. Walt Disney visited it in the 1950s, and the castle's silhouette directly inspired the design of Sleeping Beauty's castle at Disneyland in Anaheim. The most famous castle in the Disney empire is a copy of Neuschwanstein, a copy of fantasy. It's a fantasy of a fantasy. But the original, the real castle, draws about one and a half million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited castles in Europe. Ludwig never saw his castle completed, though. He was declared unfit to rule in 1886, removed from it by a government commission, and found the following day under mysterious circumstances in the shallow waters of Lake Starnberg. The castle was open to the paying public within weeks of his passing, and the government that had deposed him immediately recognized that the castle he had built, with public money, could generate public revenue. And the tourist industry that he never intended and never imagined has been operating for 140 years. 9. Mont Saint-Michel in France Mont Saint-Michel, it's not technically a castle, no, it is an abbey, a fortified monastery, it's even a tidal island, and one of the coolest structures in Europe. But its appearance, that soaring, gothic, spire-topped complex of stone buildings rising up from the middle of a vast, flat, tidal bay, is so impossibly cinematically castle-like that its exclusion from here would be a crime against visual storytelling. It sits on a granite outcrop about 900 meters in circumference, roughly 80 meters tall, and it's crowned by the abbey church, whose spires reach up to 170 meters above sea level. It's surrounded by a little medieval village of narrow streets, stone houses, and fortified walls that cling to the rock. At low tide, the island's connected to the mainlands by a natural causeway of sand and mud, and visitors can walk across the bay to the island. At high tide, though, and the tides of the bay of Mont Saint-Michel are among the most extreme, the causeway is submerged. The abbey itself was founded in 708 A.D. According to tradition, the archangel Michael appeared to the bishop of Avranches and instructed him to build a church on the rocky island. The abbey grew over the centuries, expanded, fortified, and rebuilt. Mont Saint-Michel was never captured by force, though. During the Hundred Years' War, the English besieged it repeatedly, but never took it. The English controlled virtually all of Normandy. The surrounding region was occupied territory for decades, but the island held. The garrison was small, the supplies were limited, and the tides, which cut the island off, provided a natural defense. The tides here are among the most extreme. The tidal range, that's the difference between high tide and low tide, can exceed 50 feet, and the speed at which the tide comes in has been described by local tradition as faster than a galloping horse. Well, that description's not entirely accurate. The tide doesn't move literally faster than a horse. The flats surrounding it are wide and so gently sloped that the incoming tide covers enormous areas of ground very quickly, and a person walking on them who doesn't pay attention to the tide schedule can find themselves surrounded by rising water. The quicksand here is pretty real, too. The flats contain areas of saturated sand that can trap an unwary walker. The island was eventually connected to the mainland by a causeway built in 1879. This is a solid embankment that provided permanent road access to the island, but it also disrupted that natural tidal flow. The French government recognized the problem, and a 164 million euro restoration project completed in 2015 replaced the causeway with the bridge, a slender, elevated walkway that allows the tidal water to flow freely beneath it. Mont Saint-Michel draws roughly three million people a year, and the experience of approaching this island across the flats, watching it grow from a distant silhouette to an overwhelming stone and sky reality, is one of the most dramatic approaches to any building in the world. It does look like a matte painting, like a CGI recreation, something a film director would design and a producer would reject as too unrealistic. But it's been real for 1300 years, and the tide which comes in twice a day still cuts the island off from the mainland, and it still transforms Mont Saint-Michel from a peninsula to an island and produces twice a day the most dramatic set change in history. Number 8. Predjama Castle in Slovenia. Predjama Castle is built into the mouth of a cave, a 120 meter high cliff in the Karst region of southwestern Slovenia, into which the castle has been embedded and fused. It looks less like a building attached to a rock and more like a building that sort of grew out of it organically. The castle dates to at least the 13th century, and it's been rebuilt, expanded, and modified multiple times over the following centuries, each version taking advantage of the cave system behind the castle. The cave provided storage, shelter, escape routes, and most importantly, a secret entrance. The castle's most famous resident, a knight named Erasm Luger, a 15th century robber baron who used it as his base for raids on the surrounding territory, reportedly withstood a siege of over a year by using the cave's secret passages to resupply the castle, bringing food, water, and supplies through the mountain. The story of Erasm's siege is one of the great tales of medieval defiance, and it shows exactly why Predjama Castle was built where it was built. The Habsburg governor of Trieste sent an army to besiege Predjama after Erasm killed a commander who had insulted his friend. Now the army arrived, set up camp at the base of the cliff, and waited for the garrison to starve. Weeks passed, months, and then the army waited and Erasm, safely in his cliff-embedded castle, supplied through a secret cave passage, taunted his besiegers. According to legend, he threw fresh roasted oxen and fresh cherries over the castle walls, showing to the army below that he has more food than they did, and that the siege was, from his perspective, more of an inconvenience than a crisis. Well, the siege lasted for over a year before the army found a way to end it, not by breaching the castle, but by bribing a servant inside the fortress. The servant agreed to signal the army when Erasm was in a vulnerable position, and the signal came when he was, according to the story, in the castle's outhouse. Well, the army fired a cannonball at the outhouse, and the story of Erasm Luger ended in the least dignified way possible for a medieval knight. But the castle survived, and the cave survived. Predjama, it's one of the most defensible castles in Europe, survived with it too. The transition from building to cave is pretty seamless. You walk through a doorway in a stone hall, through a room with plastered ceiling in a fireplace, through another doorway, and suddenly the ceiling is natural rock and the walls are limestone. The combination of medieval architecture and natural cave produces a structure that looks like from the valley below, something from the Lord of the Rings film, a fortress embedded into a mountain protected by a cliff. Today, Predjama Castle is open to visitors, about 250,000 a year, who can walk through the castle's rooms, enter the cave behind the castle, and experience the disorienting, slightly claustrophobic transition from building to cave. Oh yeah, and the castle's also the setting for a cool annual medieval tournament held in the summer with jousting, archery, and sword fighting. It takes place beneath the cliff in the shadow of a castle, and from every angle it looks like a castle a film director dreamed up and a geologist decided to make it real. Number 7. Chateau du Chambord, France. Chateau du Chambord is the largest castle in the Loire Valley, a renaissance masterpiece of white limestone, blue-gray slate roofs, and a skyline of towers, turrets, and chimneys. It looks like a small city, a medieval Manhattan of decorative architecture rising up from the forest of the Loire, and a display of royal excess that was, even by the standards of the French monarchy, spectacular. The castle was commissioned by King Francis I of France in 1519, and the scale of this project reflected his ambition and his ego and his determination to build a hunting lodge. Chambord was officially a hunting lodge, a fact that tells you everything you need to know about the French monarchy's concept of modesty. The castle has 440 rooms, 365 fireplaces, one for every day of the year, a coincidence that was almost certainly deliberate. It's got 84 staircases, roughly 800 sculpted columns, and it was built on a site that was so flat and marshy the entire building rests on a foundation of oak piles. The most famous feature of Chambord, though, is the double helix staircase. This is a central staircase that consists of two intertwined spirals that rise through the center of the castle from the ground floor to the roof terrace without ever meeting. Two people can climb the staircase simultaneously, one on each helix, and they can see each other through the central openings between the two spirals. This staircase is attributed by tradition to Leonardo da Vinci, who was living in France as a guest of Francis I during the period when Chambord was being designed, and it was believed to have contributed to the design before his passing in 1519. The attribution isn't proven, though no document survives that explicitly credits Leonardo with the staircase, but that double helix design is consistent with his known fascination with spiral forms. His notebooks do contain sketches of similar structures, and the connection between Leonardo and Chambord has become one of the most enduring associations in architecture history. Number 6. Himeji Castle in Japan. Himeji Castle, also known as the White Heron Castle or White Egret Castle for its brilliant white exterior and its wing-like roof lines that give the castle from a distance the appearance of a great white bird in flight. It's the finest surviving example of Japanese castle architecture, it's one of the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in Japan, and it's one of the most visited castles in the country, drawing roughly two and a half million people a year. The whole complex consists of 83 buildings, the main keep that's a six-story tower that rises up about 50 meters on the hill, three smaller keeps, a network of defensive walls, gates, and baileys, plus the labyrinthine, deliberately confusing system of paths, dead ends, and switchbacks that was designed to disorient, slow, and expose any attacking force. This defensive design is pretty ingenious, the paths to the main keep aren't straight, they wind and turn, they double back, and they force an attacker to pass beneath walls that are lined with openings for dropping rocks, boiling water, or other discouragements, and loopholes for arrows and later firearms. An army that breached the outer gate would spend valuable time navigating the maze of walls and paths before reaching the keep, and every minute spent in there was a minute spent under fire. But Emeiji Castle has survived over 400 years, including the feudal wars of the Sengoku period, the Meiji Restoration, the firebombing of Japanese cities during the Second World War, but the castle wasn't hit, and some accounts suggest that the bombers deliberately avoided it, and it survived the earthquakes that periodically shaked the region. The castle's survival is, by the standards of Japanese architecture, extraordinary. The vast majority of Japan's original castles have been destroyed by war, fire, or by earthquakes, and Emeiji is one of only 12 original castles that keep standing. That white exterior, which gives the castle its nickname, is produced by a plaster coating applied over the castle's wooden frame. It serves both an aesthetic purpose, the white plaster is awesome looking against the green hills and blue sky, and a functional purpose, the plaster is fire-resistant, which protects the wooden structure. The plaster is reapplied periodically. The most recent restoration, completed in 2015 after a five-year project, restored the castle's exterior to a brilliant, almost blinding white that drew criticism from some visitors who felt that the restored castle was too white, and the centuries of weathering and graying the restoration had removed or part of its character. But the White Heron, gleaming on its hilltop with its wings spread ready to fly, is, by the consensus of architects and historians, one of the most beautiful castles in Japan, and one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Have you ever visited a castle before? Let me know down in the comments below, and please, slap the like button, it really does help the channel out. 5. Edinburgh Castle in Scotland Edinburgh Castle sits on Castle Rock. This is a solidified core of an extinct volcano that erupted about 300 million years ago, and it's been eroded to the near-vertical outcrop of basalt that stands about 130 meters above the streets of Edinburgh. It provides, for the castle that's occupied its summit for over a thousand years, one of the most naturally defensible positions in Europe. The rock is the castle's greatest asset. The north and south faces of Castle Rock are near-vertical, and for practical purposes, they are unclimbable. The only viable approach is from the east along a narrow, rising ridge. This is the only route by which an army could approach the castle, and the route along which every siege and every assault has ever been attempted. Edinburgh Castle has been besieged more times than any other castle in the British Isles, about 26 times in its recorded history, making it one of the most attacked places in the world. The castle's been held by the Scots, by the English, by the forces of Robert the Bruce, armies of Cromwell and the Jacobites, and it's changed hands repeatedly over a millennium of warfare. The castle, though, today is a complex of buildings that spans several centuries, from the 12th century St. Margaret's Chapel, hence the oldest surviving building in Edinburgh, to the 19th century buildings that house the Scottish National War Memorial. The castle houses the the Scottish Crown Jewels, that's the oldest set of crown jewels in the British Isles, including the crown, the scepter, and the sword of state. The jewels were hidden during the English Civil War, they were walled up in a church in Dunatar Castle to prevent Oliver Cromwell's forces from seizing them, and they remained hidden for over a century before being rediscovered in 1818. The castle also houses the Stone of Destiny, the ancient stone on which Scottish kings were traditionally crowned. It was stolen by Edward I of England in 1296, it was carried off to Westminster Abbey as a trophy, and used in the coronation of every English and British monarch from Edward II to Elizabeth II, which was briefly liberated in 1950 by four Scottish students who broke into Westminster on Christmas Day, removed the 150 kilogram stone, and smuggled it back to Scotland. And then it was formally returned to Scotland in 1996, 700 years after Edward I took it. Edinburgh Castle also fires a gun every day. The one o'clock gun, a 105 millimeter field gun positioned in the castle's mills-mount battery, is fired precisely at 1 p.m. every day except on Sundays, Good Friday, and Christmas. This tradition dates back to 1861, originally a time signal for the ships in the Firth of Forth before reliable clocks were widely available, and now it's a tourist attraction, and it's a daily ritual that startles every first-time visitor to Edinburgh who's not expecting a cannon to fire from a castle. It draws about 2 million visitors per year, and makes it the most visited paid attraction in Scotland. The view from the castle ramparts encompasses the entire city of Edinburgh, the Firth of Forth, the Hills of Fife, and the landscape of southeastern Scotland, but the castle is overlooked from its perch for over a thousand years. This castle isn't beautiful in the same way that Neuschwanstein is beautiful, it's not a fairy tale, it's not a fantasy. Edinburgh Castle's like a fortress, it's a stone, cannon-scarred, weather-beaten fortress that's been attacked 26 times. It's got the kind of we're-not-going-anywhere permanence of a building that's been here for a thousand years, and that intends, based on the evidence, to be there for a thousand more. Number 4. The Alhambra in Spain. The Alhambra, a palace, a fortress, a citadel, occupying a hilltop overlooking the city of Granada in southern Spain. It's the finest example of Islamic architecture in Europe, and one of the most beautiful buildings. It was built by the last Muslim rulers of the Iberian Peninsula, the Nasrid dynasty, during the 13th and 14th centuries. Its interior decoration, a profusion of carved stucco and geometric tile work, creates spaces of transcendent beauty, and it represents the achievement of Moorish art and the final flowering of a civilization that had, by the time Alhambra was built, occupied the Iberian Peninsula for 700 years. The Nasrids knew they were the last. The Nasrid kingdom of Granada was the final Muslim state in Iberia, surrounded by the Christian kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, reduced from the huge territory that the Moors had controlled at their peak, about 80% of the peninsula. It was reduced to a small, mountainous kingdom in the diplomacy and tributary payments. The Alhambra was built in this context, a place of great beauty, created by a dynasty that understood that their civilization was ending, and that the building that they were creating would be its monument. The Court of Lions, the most famous space in the Alhambra, an open courtyard surrounded by a colonnade of slender marble columns supporting arches of stucco, centered on a fountain supported by 12 marble lions, is one of the most photographed and most studied architectural spaces. The proportions here are perfect. Light is filtered through the carved screens and the colonnade in patterns that shift with the time of day. The water which flows through narrow channels in the floor, feeding the central fountain, provides the sound of running water that is, in Islamic architecture, a symbol of paradise. The Alhambra was almost lost. After the Reconquista, the complex was neglected. It was used as a military barracks, damaged by earthquakes and partially demolished by Napoleon, who attempted to blow up sections of the complex during their retreat from Spain in 1812. And they succeeded in destroying several towers before a Spanish soldier, a man named José García, discovered and disconnected the fuses, saving the Alhambra from complete destruction. Its rehabilitation began in the 19th century, driven in large part by the American writer Washington Irving, who lived in the Alhambra in 1829 and whose books, Tales of the Alhambra, published in 1832, introduced the complex to an international audience, and it sparked a romantic fascination with Moorish Spain that led to the Alhambra's restoration. It gets about 2.5 million people a year, making it the most visited monument in Spain, and the experience of walking through the Nazarite palaces, through the Court of Lions, the Hall of Ambassadors, whose cedar ceiling, carved in 8,000 individual pieces, and through the gardens of the Summer Palace adjacent, with its fountains and its water channels, is widely described as one of the most beautiful experiences in the world. The Alhambra fell in 1492 when the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella conquered Granada, ending 781 years of Moorish presence. The story of the fall is one of the most poignant in European history. The last Nazarite sultan, Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil, surrendered the keys of Alhambra to Ferdinand and Isabella, and rode out of Granada toward exile in North Africa. According to tradition, Boabdil paused on a mountain pass south of the city, looked back at the Alhambra for the last time, and wept. His mother reportedly said to him, weep like a woman for what you could not defend as a man. This pass is still known as the Last Sigh of the Moor. 3. Crac de Chevalier Crac de Chevalier, a massive concentric stone fortress perched on a hilltop in western Syria, overlooks the Homs Gap, that's the pass between the coastal mountains and the interior of Syria, is, by the consensus of military historians, the greatest crusader castle ever built. It's one of the finest examples of medieval architecture in the world. T.E. Lawrence, the Lawrence of Arabia, who studied crusader castles extensively, called Crac de Chevalier perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world. The castle was held by the Knights Hospitaller, a military religious order, that garrisoned Crac de Chevalier from 1142 to 1271, maintaining a force of about 2,000 men, roughly including 60 knights. The castle's defenses were concentric, two rings of massive stone walls, the inner ring higher than the outer, separated by a moat and connected by a series of towers and gateways. It forced any attacker to breach one wall, cross a killing zone, then breach a second, higher, more heavily defended wall before reaching the castle's inner courtyard. The design was, for the period, state of the art, and the castle withstood siege after siege over 129 years of occupation, repelling attacks by Muslim armies that were in many cases vastly larger than the garrison. The castle fell in 1271, not by storm but by deception. The Mamluk Sultan besieged the castle, breached the outer wall but not the inner, and reportedly sent the garrison a forged letter, supposedly from the Grand Master of the Hospitallers, ordering them to surrender. The garrison, believing the letter to be genuine, surrendered, and the castle that had resisted military force for 129 years was taken by a piece of paper. 2. Hohenzollern Castle, Germany This castle sits on the top of Mount Hohenzollern, a 800-meter peak in the Swabian Alps of southern Germany, and on days when the clouds sit low in the valleys, it appears to float above the land, the tower and ramparts rising up from a sea of white clouds. This castle is the ancestral seat of the House of Hohenzollern, one of the most important royal dynasties in European history, a family that produced the Kings of Prussia and the German Kaisers, the emperors who ruled Germany from unification in 1871 to the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. The current castle is the third on the site, the first was built in the 11th century and destroyed during a siege in 1423, the second was built in the 15th century and gradually fell into ruin, and the third, the castle that stands today, was built between 1846 and 1867 by King Frederick William IV of Prussia as a monument to the Hohenzollern dynasty's origins, a romantic neo-gothic fairy tale reconstruction of a medieval castle. The castle is surrounded by a series of ramparts, bastions and defensive walls that follow the contour of the mountain, the fortifications are arranged in concentric rings that give it, as seen from below, layered wedding cake appearance. It culminates in the castle's central buildings and the chapel that contains the tombs of Frederick the Great and his father, Frederick William I. Their remains were moved here after the Second World War to protect them from Soviet advance into Eastern Germany. The views from Hohenzollern Castle are among the most spectacular in Germany, on clear days, the ramparts offer a panorama that extends across the Alps, the Black Forest and the plains of southern Germany, and on cloudy days, the days that photographers wait for, the days that produce the images that have made it one of the most photographed castles in Europe, it rises above the clouds in a scene that looks, from every angle, like the establishing shot of a fantasy film. It's a castle in the sky, floating above the world, unreachable and unreal. 1. THE ALCÁZAR OF SEGOVIA, SPAIN The Alcázar of Segovia sits at the confluence of the Eresma and Clamores River in central Spain. It's shaped like the bow of a ship. The profile of the castle, tall, narrow, a tapering prow of stone that rises from the rock and meets at a point at two rivers, flanked by round turrets with slate-blue conical roofs and crowned by soaring central towers, the Tower of John II, dominates the Segovia skyline. This is the silhouette that Walt Disney chose as the inspiration for Cinderella's castle at Walt Disney World in Florida. The Alcázar has been a Roman fort, a Moorish fortress, a Christian palace, a state prison, a royal artillery college, and a military archive. The building's function has changed with every century and every civilization that has occupied the city of Segovia. Its current appearance dates primarily to the restorations of the 19th and 20th centuries after a catastrophic fire in 1862 destroyed much of its interior. It required a reconstruction that restored it to its medieval appearance while modernizing the interior. The most famous space in the castle is the Hall of Monarchs, a long vaulted room decorated with the frieze of 52 painted and gilded statues, representing every king and queen of Castile, Leon, and Asturias from the 8th century to the 16th, arranged in chronological order around the room, watching from their gilded niches. The hall was the setting for the coronation of Isabella I of Castile in 1474, the queen whose marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon united Spain, whose sponsorship of Columbus led to the discovery of the Americas, and whose reign transformed Spain from a collection of competing kingdoms into one of the most powerful nations in Europe. We put the Alcázar of Segovia last on this list because it's the one that looks most like a fantasy. The blue turrets, the towers, the rocky crag, and the two rivers converging below. And because it's the castle that had the most influence on the fantasy castles that the modern world has grown up with. The castles in storybooks, films, and video games, the illustrations that kids see when they read fairy tales and imagine a castle on a hill. All of them, consciously or probably unconsciously, draw on the visual language of castles that include, somewhere in its DNA, the Alcázar of Segovia. This castle looks like a fantasy and it's become the source of the fantasy. And the real building, standing there on its rock, overlooking the rivers, 900 years old, is the proof that the most fantastic looking things in the world aren't the things we imagine. They're the things that already exist.