Schönburg

Building began in the first half of the 12th century, though whether the castle was raised by the Archbishop of Magdeburg or as an imperial stronghold is not established. It first appears in the sources in 1149, held as a fief by Hermann von Stahleck, who had his rival for the Rhenish Palatinate, Otto II of Rheineck, murdered here. From the 12th century the Lords of Schönburg ruled the town of Oberwesel from the castle and held the right to levy tolls on Rhine river traffic.

From the mid-13th century the Schönburg family had split into several branches who lived together at the castle as joint heirs, passing shared ownership on through the generations; by the 14th century the site had grown into a Ganerbenburg with three separate residential quarters and three keeps, a division still traceable in the buildings today despite later rebuilding. A list of 1340 names ninety-five co-owners of the castle, though far from all of them lived there. The building programme closed with the Hohe Mantel, a shield wall probably raised under Balduin of Trier in the first half of the 14th century and first documented in 1357.

The most notable of the Lords of Schönburg was Friedrich von Schönburg, a much-feared soldier known as "Marshal Schomberg," who served as a colonel and later a general under the King of France in campaigns in France and Portugal, then for Prussia, and finally for William, Prince of Orange, in England. The castle was burned down in 1689 by French troops during the War of the Grand Alliance. The Schönburg line ended with the death of Friedrich's son, the family's last heir, in 1719, and the ruin then passed to the Electorate of Trier.

The castle lay in ruins for roughly two centuries; visiting in 1840, Victor Hugo described Oberwesel's ruined castle as one of the most admirable heaps of ruins in Europe. The German-American T. J. Oakley Rhinelander, whose family had emigrated from the Rhineland in the late 18th century and made a fortune in East Coast American real estate — among their holdings was the land where Wall Street now stands — bought the castle from the town and carried out a partial rebuilding between 1885 and 1901. Rhinelander died in 1947, and in 1950 the town of Oberwesel bought the castle back from his heir. Its northern wing was rebuilt as a Kolping youth hostel between 1951 and 1953, and its southern wing has been run since 1957 as a hotel and restaurant by the Hüttl family under a long-term lease from the town, restored in coordination with the state historic preservation office; since April 2011 the 25-metre gatehouse tower has held a museum on castle-building, heritage conservation and castles in wartime. The Schönburg is protected today as a listed Kulturdenkmal.