Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg
The Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg, sometimes also Haut-Kœnigsbourg, is a medieval castle located in the commune of Orschwiller in the Bas-Rhin département of Alsace, France. Located in the Vosges mountains just west of Sélestat, situated in a strategic area on a rocky spur overlooking the Upper Rhine Plain, it was used by successive powers from the Middle Ages until the Thirty Years' War when it was abandoned. From 1900 to 1908 it was rebuilt at the behest of the German kaiser Wilhelm II. Today it is a major tourist site, attracting more than 500,000 visitors a year.
View from the castle over the Alsatian plain up to the Black Forest
Castle ruins, 1851
Marienburg Castle, Malbork, Poland.
Main gate with arms of Wilhelm II
Bas-Rhin is a département in Alsace which is a part of the Grand Est super-region of France. The name means 'Lower Rhine', referring to its lower altitude among the two French Rhine departments: it is downstream of the Haut-Rhin department. Both belong to the European Upper Rhine region. It is, with the Haut-Rhin, one of the two departments of the traditional Alsace region which until 1871, also included the area now known as the Territoire de Belfort. The more populous and densely populated of the pair, it had 1,152,662 inhabitants in 2021. The prefecture is based in Strasbourg. The INSEE and Post Code is 67.
Prefecture building of the Bas-Rhin department, in Strasbourg
Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg
Strasbourg Cathedral
Covered Bridge at Strasbourg