r/interestingasfuck • u/The_Love-Tap • 22h ago

Germany has more castles than the United States has McDonald’s. This is the Eltz castle, located in Wiershem. It has been owned and occupied by the same family for 33 generations over 800 years

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u/TadpoleOfDoom 22h ago

That's insane considering how much smaller Germany is, how much more work goes into building a castle, and how popular McDonald's is.

Damn that castle is beautiful though. Love the bridge especially.

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u/Regular_Fox_859 21h ago

I've been there! You can go inside but can't take pictures as people still actually live there. It's absolutely breathtaking and was one of the best parts of my trip (though the whole country was incredible honestly). The castle is super tall but you can't see it until you're up close because it's in the center of a deep valley surrounded by tall hills. This is also one of the reasons it's stood (mostly) undisturbed for so long

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u/Regular_Fox_859 21h ago

I did take 1 picture of the inside before they told us photography wasn't allowed

(Yes, that sword on the right is made out of a sawfish)

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u/roottubers 21h ago

Praise the Emporer they even have a chainsword

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u/pantpiratesteve 20h ago

the little cannon on a stick is elite

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u/The_300_goats 21h ago

Photography isn't allowed in the Sistine chapel or the Uffizi gallery either. But...

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u/round_stick 21h ago

You can take pictures in Uffizi

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u/The_300_goats 21h ago

True, I was thinking of Galleria dell'Accademia

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u/RickedSab 21h ago

I wonder if there’s an elevator inside

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u/Regular_Fox_859 21h ago

Not that I'm aware of! The staircases were all incredibly steep and narrow, I almost slipped down a flight of them lol

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u/Overall_Occasion_175 21h ago

Does anybody else see this kind of thing and immediately start thinking about how to build it in Minecraft?

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u/Lord_Skyblocker 20h ago

Well, now I do

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u/frogdujour 15h ago

I've been there too, it's an awesome spot!

One crazy thing I recall is that on the next hill over, some people spent years in the 1330s building a "siege castle", a whole other adjacent smaller castle for the sole purpose of occasionally catapulting carefully carved round stone "cannonballs" at the Eltz castle to presumably take it over. I think they were at it for 5 years. It failed. The siege castle is now just ruins, and the Eltz castle had a pile of those stone balls in their courtyard to display.

Another great thing here is instead of parking in the area by the main entrance, you could park about 2km away and take this hiking path through the woods along a stream that leads you to the castle. It felt about as close to an actual medieval travel experience as you can get I think, traversing along with nothing but nature and then suddenly there's this huge castle emerging on a hill past the woods.

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u/krkrkkrk 14h ago

any othet tips on castles or combined routes/roadmaps?

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u/Regular_Fox_859 8h ago

Sure! Our trip was a little unusual because we were there for a university symposium my girlfriend was attending, so the first week I just went on day trips from our home base in Mülheim an der Ruhr.

Mülheim itself is in Germany's industrial heartland, and neighboring Essen has the Zollverein UNESCO heritage site which has an awesome museum in an old coal mining complex.

Dusseldorf has Schloss Benrath which is more of a Rococo-style estate than a castle, but it's beautiful nonetheless. I also went to the nearby Zons which has a walled old town. There just so happened to be a street fair with food, drinks, and crafts when I was there.

I went to Aachen (which has a huge beautiful cathedral) and Monschau (a super picturesque town near the mountains with a stream running through it) one day

I took a whole day to make the 2.5 hour drive to Schloss Berg above, and it was definitely worth it

I went to Amsterdam on the train as a day trip but it was a bit rushed so I wouldn't recommend that. But the 1.5 hour drive to Maastricht (also in the Netherlands but way further south) was awesome. Lots of cool little stores and there was a huge market in the town square with stalls selling cheese, fried dough, fried fish, flowers, fruit, fabric and other assorted things.

When my girlfriend was done with her symposium, we spent the first night in Cologne which was fun. We did some shopping, got some good food and beer, and the cathedral is absolutely breathtaking

From there we went to Heidelberg which I would say is a must-see. It's a super old town bisected by a river and overlooked by a castle. The dinner we got at Vetter's Brauhaus was awesome

From there we went to Freiburg which we didn't get to see as much of as I wanted, but the cathedral was beautiful and we did some fun shopping.

From there we drove through the Black Forest to Nuremberg. The food there was fantastic and there are multiple awesome museums. The town itself is beautiful as well. Over the next few days we also went to Bamberg and Rothenburg ob der Tauber nearby.

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u/krkrkkrk 6h ago

Many thanks for the write-up! Im about to go on a road trip in germany focusing on castles and medieval architecture for a writing project. I feel like seeing it in person is very different from docus/yt etc. I take it you'd recommend Essen and its surroundings for that purpose? :)

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u/dachfuerst 21h ago

I think the lore is that back in the day, there were two branches of the Eltz family tree living inside the castle; and they didn't get along with each other. So each one just built and added to their side of the building, creating this rather dense and High-rising structure over many, many years.

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u/Salmonman4 21h ago edited 21h ago

I heard that the Holy Roman Empire had an unofficial rule that there should be a castle at least within a day's horse-ride (or was it just foot-travel) everywhere in the land .

EDIT: grammar

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u/Jorgilu 21h ago

It was also due to the fact that the emperor had no real power to stop pretty much any schmuck from building a castle in "his" lands.

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u/irspangler 20h ago

Generally speaking, Europe has (at least) a town/village in every direction within a day's horse-ride. There are very few large, open land areas in Europe barring impassable terrain like mountain ranges - and even then, they're loaded with little mountain villages.

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u/Salmonman4 19h ago

Villages, yes. They grow pretty much naturally.

Castles on the other hand require deliberate investment of resources and special skilled artisans to build

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u/orangeyougladiator 20h ago

Don’t really matter here since the Roman’s never conquered Germany

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u/almodsz 17h ago edited 17h ago

He was talking about the Holy Roman Empire and not the Roman Empire.

Also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation or the First Reich.

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u/Salmonman4 20h ago

Neither was HRE an Empire, nor particularly Holy

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u/Crop_olite 21h ago

I don't think it's that insane if you consider the age of Germany/the amount time poeple haved lived in the geographical area of Germany, compared to the age of McDonald's.

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u/TyGuySly 21h ago

McDonald’s is only 84 years old.

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u/TadpoleOfDoom 18h ago

They're also piss easy to build by comparison 

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u/WalkAffectionate2683 21h ago

And think that France has probably double the amount of castle Germany has... 

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u/SuperBackup9000 17h ago

The thing about it is how castle ruins are considered castles, so the majority of castles are just fragments.

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u/IrishDeadhead 15h ago

It seems to be suggested online that Ireland has about 30,000 castles. Most would be ruins. There genuinely are castles everywhere here, but that number sounds crazy.

Being a small country, it would mean there's a castle per square mile.

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u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ 13h ago

Well nobody lives in McDonald's.