The 20 best castles in Europe

No castle in Europe has done more jobs. William the Conqueror began the White Tower in 1078 to hold London down; Richard I, Henry III and Edward I wrapped it in two rings of curtain wall, thirteen mural towers and a wet moat off the Thames, making it a first-rank concentric fortress. It has since served as royal palace, armoury, treasury, mint, record office, menagerie and state prison, and it still guards the Crown Jewels of England.

The history inside the walls is as dense as the stone. The Princes in the Tower vanished here in the 1480s; Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard were executed on Tower Green; Elizabeth I was held here before she was queen, and Walter Raleigh wrote his History of the World in the Bloody Tower. It is the most complete medieval fortress in any European capital, and after nine and a half centuries it has never stopped being used.

Neuschwanstein is the castle the rest of the world pictures when it hears the word. Ludwig II of Bavaria commissioned it in 1869 as a retreat from court and a homage to Wagner, had the first designs drawn by the stage designer Christian Jank, and set it on a crag above the Pöllat Gorge with the Alps behind — a building composed for the view rather than for defence.

Ludwig paid for it privately and by heavy borrowing, and never saw it finished: he died in disputed circumstances in 1886 and the unfinished castle opened to the public within weeks. Inside are the Throne Hall, the Wagnerian Singers' Hall and a grotto built into the living rock; outside is the silhouette Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty Castle was drawn from. Around 1.4 million people a year make the climb.

Windsor is the great survivor: begun by William the Conqueror after 1066 as a motte-and-bailey guarding the Thames west of London, made a royal residence by Henry I in the early 12th century, and lived in by the crown ever since — the longest-occupied palace in Europe and the largest inhabited castle in the world, covering some five hectares.

Edward III's rebuilding in the 14th century was the most expensive secular building project of the English Middle Ages; the state apartments were recast in the early 19th; a fire damaged more than a hundred rooms in 1992 and five years of work put them back. St George's Chapel, one of the finest pieces of Perpendicular Gothic anywhere, holds the tombs of Henry VIII, Charles I, Elizabeth II and other sovereigns, and in 1917 the castle gave the royal house its name.

Nowhere else in Europe does a castle sit so completely on top of the city it made. Edinburgh's Castle Rock is a volcanic plug with cliffs falling eighty metres on three sides and only the ridge of the Royal Mile climbing to the gate. It has been a royal castle since the 11th century and a garrison since the 17th, and research published in 2014 counted twenty-six sieges — a strong claim to being the most attacked place in Britain.

The Lang Siege of 1573 destroyed most of the medieval fabric, so what stands is a layered fortress: St Margaret's Chapel of about 1130, the oldest building in the city; the Great Hall of James IV; the Half-Moon Battery raised over the ruins of David's Tower; Mons Meg, the great 15th-century bombard; and the Honours of Scotland, the oldest crown jewels in Britain. The gun still fires at one o'clock.

Malbork is the biggest castle in the world by land area and the largest brick building in Europe: a High, Middle and Lower Castle chained one behind the other across some twenty-one hectares, ringed by dry moats and towering walls, and completed in 1406 as the capital of the Teutonic Order's crusading state on the Vistula. To break in, an attacker had to take three castles in succession.

It was never stormed — it held out in 1410 after the Order's catastrophe at Grunwald — and it left the Knights' hands in 1457 only because their unpaid mercenaries sold it to the Polish crown. Heavily damaged in 1945 and painstakingly rebuilt, it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the scale of the Grand Master's palace and the vaulted refectories is difficult to credit until you stand in them.

Prague Castle is less a castle than a fortified city on a ridge: nearly seven hectares of courtyards, palaces, churches, lanes and gardens above the Vltava, which Guinness records as the largest ancient castle in the world. Founded around 870, it has been the seat of Bohemian kings, Holy Roman emperors and, since 1918, of Czechoslovak and Czech presidents — an unbroken thousand years of government from one hill.

St Vitus Cathedral rises from the middle of it, begun for Charles IV in 1344 and finished only in 1929; the Old Royal Palace holds the enormous rib-vaulted Vladislav Hall, and the window of the 1618 Defenestration that started the Thirty Years' War. The Bohemian crown jewels are still kept here behind a door with seven locks.

Castel Sant'Angelo began in AD 139 as the mausoleum of the emperor Hadrian, a colossal drum on the bank of the Tiber that was once the tallest building in Rome. The popes turned the tomb into their citadel, wrapping it in bastions and naming it for the Archangel Michael, who was said to have appeared above it sheathing his sword to mark the end of a plague.

The Passetto di Borgo, an elevated walled corridor, runs from the castle to the Vatican — and in 1527, when the troops of Charles V sacked Rome, Clement VII escaped along it and held out inside while his Swiss Guard died covering the retreat. The spiral ramp climbs from the Roman core through papal apartments to a terrace over the whole city, the terrace where Puccini has Tosca throw herself from the walls.

Bran was built in 1377 by the Saxons of Braşov, licensed by Louis I of Hungary, to hold the pass between Transylvania and Wallachia — a tall, narrow castle stacked on a rock over the gorge, with a courtyard barely wide enough to turn a cart in. Its worldwide fame as Dracula's castle is marketing: Bram Stoker never saw it and Vlad the Impaler, at most, passed through the valley below.

The truer story is warmer. After 1920 the people of Braşov gave the castle to Queen Marie of Romania, who restored it, filled it with her collection and loved it so well that after her death her heart was kept at the castle for decades. Seized by the communist state in 1948 and returned in 2006 to her grandson, it remains the most visited castle in Romania.

Burg Eltz is the most complete picture anywhere of what a lived-in medieval castle actually looked like. Built on an oval spur of rock in a wooded valley above the Elzbach, it is a Ganerbenburg — a castle shared between co-heir branches of one family — so three separate house-complexes were built upward on the same tiny footprint, leaving eight towers and a hundred-odd rooms crowded together above the trees.

It has never been destroyed, one of only three castles in the Eifel never to fall, and the Eltz family still owns it in the thirty-fourth generation. The Rübenach and Rodendorf houses are open with their original furnishings, tapestries and armoury in place — not a restoration of a lost interior but the real thing, kept.

Bamburgh crowns a great dolerite crag rising straight out of the Northumberland dunes, the sea on one side and the Cheviots inland — the most commanding castle site in England. It carried the Brittonic fort of Din Guarie, became the royal seat of the kings of Bernicia and then of Northumbria, and the Normans built the keep that still anchors the walls.

In 1464 it made military history for the wrong reason: the Earl of Warwick's guns battered its Lancastrian garrison into surrender, the first English castle ever taken by gunpowder artillery. Left to decay, it was rescued and rebuilt by the Victorian industrialist William Armstrong, whose descendants live there still — nine acres of walls, halls and batteries above one of the finest beaches in Britain.

Caernarfon was begun in 1283 as the seat of English power in a conquered Wales, and it was designed to say so. Instead of the round towers used elsewhere, James of St George gave it many-sided towers and walls banded in coloured stone, a deliberate echo of the walls of Constantinople and of the Roman fort at nearby Segontium — imperial imagery in masonry, wrapped around the walled town as well as the castle.

Militarily it earned the design. Madog ap Llywelyn's rising sacked it in 1294 while it was still half-built, but once finished a garrison of barely thirty held it through Owain Glyndŵr's sieges of 1401–04, and it fell only by surrender to Parliament in 1646. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the King's Gate, the Eagle Tower and the wall-walks are among the finest military architecture in Europe.

Alnwick was raised about 1096 by Ivo de Vesci to guard a crossing of the Aln, and it was already described as very strong when David I of Scotland took it in 1136; William the Lion besieged it twice and was captured outside its walls in 1174. From the 14th century it has belonged to the Percys, earls and later dukes of Northumberland, whose feuds and rebellions — Harry Hotspur among them — run through the Wars of the Roses.

What makes it worth the visit is the collision of centuries inside one shell: a medieval border fortress from the outside, and behind the arrow slits a suite of Italian Renaissance state rooms created for the 4th Duke in the 1850s, hung with Titian, Van Dyck and Canaletto. The 12th Duke still lives there, and with the Alnwick Garden next door it draws well over half a million visitors a year.

Corvin is the finest Gothic secular building in south-eastern Europe. John Hunyadi, voivode of Transylvania and regent of Hungary, rebuilt it from 1446 around an older keep, and his son Matthias Corvinus carried the work on until by 1480 it was among the largest buildings in the region — a bristle of buttresses, oriel windows and tall tiled roofs entered across a long timber bridge on stone piers.

Inside are the marble-columned Knights' Hall and Diet Hall, used for feasts and formal audiences, and a deep courtyard well that legend says was dug by Turkish prisoners over fifteen years in exchange for a freedom they never got. Local tradition also makes Corvin the place where Vlad the Impaler was imprisoned — unproven, but the castle hardly needs the help.

Stirling holds a volcanic crag above the lowest bridging point of the River Forth, cliffs on three sides and one gentle approach, which made it the strategic hinge of Scotland: whoever held Stirling held the road north. It was fought over at least eight times, from Stirling Bridge and Bannockburn under its walls to Edward I's giant trebuchet, the Warwolf, in 1304, and last of all against Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1746.

It was also a court. Mary, Queen of Scots was crowned in the Chapel Royal at nine months old, and James V's palace block of the 1540s is the most complete Renaissance building in Scotland — its recreated royal apartments hung with the woven Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries and roofed in the carved oak Stirling Heads. Fortress and palace in one, which few castles manage.

Ashford began in 1228 as a stronghold of the Anglo-Norman de Burgos on the shore of Lough Corrib and stayed with the family for three centuries until Sir Richard Bingham took it for the English crown in 1589. The Brownes added a French-styled hunting lodge in the 1670s, and from 1852 Sir Benjamin Guinness and his son Lord Ardilaun wrapped the whole estate in neo-Gothic ranges, towers and battlements, laying out the drives, woods and gardens around it.

The result is the grandest castle in the west of Ireland: a long crenellated silhouette above its lawns with the lake behind and Connemara beyond. It has been a hotel since 1939 — John Ford's cast stayed here while filming The Quiet Man — which makes it one of the very few castles on this list where the visit can last all night.

Dover has guarded the shortest crossing to France since the Iron Age, and every age has added to it. The site holds a Roman lighthouse, one of only three surviving in the world and among the oldest standing structures in Britain; Henry II raised the great keep and inner bailey in the 1180s; two rings of curtain wall and mural towers ring the whole cliff top.

It held when the country did not: in 1216–17, with much of England lost to Prince Louis of France, Hubert de Burgh's garrison plugged a mined breach and never gave in, and the wrecked gate was rebuilt as a system of underground tunnels. Those tunnels were dug deeper in the Napoleonic wars and deeper again in the Second World War, when Vice-Admiral Ramsay ran Operation Dynamo — the Dunkirk evacuation — from a command post cut into the white cliffs.

Hohensalzburg fills the whole crest of the Festungsberg above Salzburg, begun in 1077 under Archbishop Gebhard during the Investiture Controversy and enlarged by the prince-archbishops for six hundred years into one of the largest completely preserved medieval fortresses in Europe. Because it was never wrecked, the interiors survive — above all the Golden Hall and Golden Chamber left by Leonhard von Keutschach around 1500, with their gilded studs and twisted marble column.

No enemy ever took it. Its one real test came in the Peasants' War of 1525, when miners and townsfolk failed to break in, and it opened its gates just once, bloodlessly, to Napoleon's French in 1800. The Reisszug, the freight funicular that hauls goods up to the courtyards, was described in 1515 and still runs — the oldest operational railway of its kind in the world.

Richard the Lionheart built Gaillard between 1196 and 1198 — barely two years, at enormous cost — on a chalk spur ninety metres above a loop of the Seine, to bar Philip II's road to Rouen and hold Normandy. It was the most advanced castle in Europe when it was finished: stacked baileys each commanding the last, a keep with one of the earliest uses of machicolation on the continent, and a scalloped inner wall designed to deflect stone shot.

Philip II took it anyway, in a siege that ran from September 1203 to March 1204 — his men filled the outer ditch, undermined the wall, and got into the middle ward by climbing a latrine chute into the chapel. Normandy fell with the castle. Henry IV ordered its demolition in 1599, and what is left is a splintered white ruin above Les Andelys, still the best-sited castle in northern France.

Chillon stands on an oval rock just off the shore of Lake Geneva, so the walls come straight out of the water with the Alps behind and the whole building doubled in the lake on a still morning. The counts of Savoy held it from the 12th century as a residence, a toll-station on the road to the Italian passes and a prison, and twenty-five buildings are packed inside the curtain, from great halls to the vaulted underground chambers hollowed into the rock.

It was those chambers that made it famous. François Bonivard was held in the dungeon for six years in the 1530s, four of them chained to a pillar, and Byron's Prisoner of Chillon brought the Romantics flocking — Rousseau, Shelley, Hugo, Dickens. Byron's name, carved on a pillar, is still shown to visitors. It is the most visited historic building in Switzerland.

Eilean Donan sits on a tidal island at the meeting of Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh, joined to the shore by a low arched bridge with the hills of Kintail behind — the image the whole world uses for Highland Scotland. The first castle went up in the 13th century and became a stronghold of the Mackenzies of Kintail and their allies the MacRaes.

In 1719 the Mackenzies' Jacobite loyalties finished it: a small Spanish garrison was holding the castle when three Royal Navy frigates bombarded it and blew up its powder store, leaving a ruin that lay untouched for two hundred years. Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap rebuilt it on the old footings between 1919 and 1932, and it is now one of the most visited castles in Scotland.