Reichenstein Castle

Reichenstein, also called the Falkenburg, is a hill castle on a mountain spur on the eastern slope of the Bingen Forest, above Trechtingshausen in the Mainz-Bingen district; Bingen itself lies about five kilometres to the south-east as the crow flies. The fabric goes back to around 1100. It first appears in the written record in 1213, when the imperial abbey of Kornelimünster near Aachen installed Philipp III of Bolanden here as castellanus and Vogt.

A first capture in 1253 is doubted, and by some accounts denied outright. What is firmly attested is the siege of 1282, when King Rudolf of Habsburg took the castle and destroyed it; a ban on rebuilding was then laid on the site. From 1290 the ruin was held by the Counts Palatine.

In 1344 the Counts Palatine gave up their claim in favour of Electoral Mainz, and a rapid rebuilding followed. A double ring wall enclosed a rectangular residential tower and the inner courtyard of the main castle, with an outer bailey set in front of it to the north.

In 1396 the cathedral chapter of Mainz elected Gottfried of Leiningen as archbishop. The following year the Pope disregarded that election and named Johann II of Nassau instead, and Gottfried shut himself up in Reichenstein. Only after stubborn negotiation did he renounce the bishop's chair, taking the office of cathedral provost of Mainz in compensation. His climbdown spared the castle a fresh assault and the further destruction that might have come with it.

From the sixteenth century onwards the castle was left to decay, and what remained of it was blown up in 1689 during the War of the Palatine Succession.

In 1834 Franz Wilhelm von Barfus bought the ruin and converted one of its towers into a residence. His heirs sold the castle in 1877 to the Freiherr von Rehfuß, who passed it on in 1889 to the consul Chosodowsky.

Reichenstein owes its present shape to Baron Nikolaus von Kirsch-Puricelli, a wealthy industrialist and owner of the Rheinböllerhütte ironworks, who had it rebuilt between 1899 and 1902 to plans by the Regensburg architect Georg Strebel as a neo-Gothic residence in the Tudor manner. Further dwellings and a lookout tower went up on the ground of the old outer bailey. Reichenstein was the last castle in the Upper Middle Rhine Valley to be rebuilt in the spirit of Rhine Romanticism.

The family sold up in the 1990s. In 2014 the media proprietor Lambert Lensing-Wolff, a descendant of the Kirsch-Puricellis, bought Reichenstein as a weekend seat and runs a museum and a hotel with restaurant in it. The museum fills the surviving rooms with a large collection of historical weapons and armour, together with cast-iron fireback plates from the Stromberger Neuhütte and the Rheinböllerhütte; the restaurant occupies the outer bailey buildings, the hotel has operated since the end of 2015, and weddings are held in the castle chapel. The castle is a listed cultural monument and stands within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley.