Landskron Castle

The hill was occupied long before any castle stood on it: burial mounds, inscribed stones and swords of around 800 BC were recovered from the site, some of them later set into the walls of the castle's Kronensaal. The estates around Lake Ossiach appear in an 878 deed of the East Frankish king Carloman of Bavaria, who granted them to the monastery of Altötting he had founded shortly before. In the 1020s the lands were held by Count Ozi of the Chiemgau, probably a scion of the Otakar dynasty, who founded Ossiach Abbey nearby; a castle was raised here under the Counts of Sternberg, and one already stood on the rock cone when the Counts of Ortenburg bought the lordship in 1330.

Landskron itself is first named in a deed of 25 July 1351. The Habsburg duke Albert II of Austria, Carinthian duke since 1335, bought the fortress and had it rebuilt as an important stronghold within the Carinthian possessions of the Bamberg prince-bishops. The Habsburg rulers then pawned it out in turn: to the Counts of Celje, heirs of the Ortenburg line, whose burgrave at Landskron was named in 1423 as Andreas von Graben zu Sommeregg, and to the Lords of Stubenberg, who held it from 1436 to 1447. In 1511 Emperor Maximilian I bestowed the estate on the Knightly Order of Saint George at Millstatt, and the fortress decayed.

No rebuilding followed the fire that struck the castle in 1542. In the same year Emperor Ferdinand I sold Landskron to the Ortenburg castellan Christoph von Khevenhüller, who made it his main residence and had it rebuilt in a lavish Renaissance style; from 1543 the family carried the style 'von Landskron'. In 1552 Khevenhüller received Emperor Charles V, who had fled to Carinthia before the Protestant troops of Elector Maurice of Saxony. By about 1600 the castle was a showpiece Renaissance seat with a double ring wall and seven towers, reckoned a centre of the province's social life.

Being Protestants themselves, the Khevenhüllers were stripped of Landskron during the Thirty Years' War, by order of Emperor Ferdinand II in 1628, in the expropriation of the Protestant nobility.

In 1639 the castle passed to the Dietrichstein comital dynasty. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 the Khevenhüllers claimed it back and pressed a lawsuit for decades, without success. The Dietrichstein owners mostly resided on their Nikolsburg (Mikulov) estates in Moravia, and the castle decayed. Its exposed position brought repeated fires from lightning strikes — in the early 16th century, in 1542, in 1585, and finally in 1812, when a blaze devastated Landskron. The roof was not made good again and the building was left to fall in; the watchtower collapsed in 1914.

From 1953 the remains were conserved in a revitalisation led by Hans Maresch, and parts of the complex have been used as a restaurant since. The ruins stand at 658 metres on the Ossiach Tauern range northeast of Villach and are a listed monument under Austrian heritage protection. The Adlerarena falconry centre here holds public birds-of-prey displays through the summer half of the year, and a macaque enclosure sits nearby; in 2023 Landskron was voted the most beautiful place in Austria on the ORF programme 9 Plätze – 9 Schätze.