The 20 prettiest castles in Europe

Neuschwanstein was composed rather than built. Ludwig II of Bavaria commissioned it in 1869 and had the first drawings made not by an architect but by Christian Jank, a stage designer for Wagner's operas; Eduard Riedel was brought in afterwards to make the fantasy stand up. The result is a building arranged for the view — pale limestone towers stacked against the wooded crag above the Pöllat Gorge, the Alpsee below and the Alps behind, best seen from the Marienbrücke slung across the ravine.

Nothing about it was ever meant to hold a gate. Ludwig paid from his own fortune and heavy borrowing, died in 1886 with the castle unfinished, and it opened to visitors within weeks of his death. Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty Castle was drawn from it, which is why so many people meet Neuschwanstein's silhouette long before they learn its name.

Burg Eltz is beautiful because it grew rather than was designed. It is a Ganerbenburg, a castle divided between co-heir branches of one family, and each branch built upward on the same cramped oval of rock above the Elzbach — so eight towers and a tangle of half-timbered gables, oriels and turrets are packed together like a small town balanced on a spur, ringed on three sides by a loop of the stream and closed in by forest.

It has never been destroyed, one of only three castles in the Eifel that can say so, and the Eltz family still holds it after more than eight centuries — the thirty-fourth generation. West Germany put it on the 500-mark note, and the approach on foot through the beech woods, where the towers appear all at once out of the trees, is the single best-staged arrival of any castle in Europe.

Eilean Donan takes its beauty entirely from where it stands: a small tidal island at the meeting of Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh, with the hills of Kintail rising behind it and a low arched bridge curving out to the gate. The tide fills and empties around it twice a day, and the light off the sea lochs does the rest.

The romance is real; the stonework is young. The medieval Mackenzie and MacRae stronghold was blown apart by Royal Navy ships in 1719, after the Jacobite garrison holding it was overwhelmed, and it lay a ruin for two hundred years until Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap rebuilt it between 1919 and 1932. What is photographed today is that reconstruction, raised on the old footings — which takes nothing away from the view.

Chillon sits on an oval rock a few metres off the shore of Lake Geneva, so that the walls rise straight out of the water and the whole castle doubles in the lake on a still morning. Behind it the Alps climb; in front, the water runs clear over stones. The House of Savoy built it as a residence and a toll-station on the road to the Italian passes, and its lakeward face — a stack of pale stone and dark wooden roofs — was shaped as much for arriving guests as for defence.

It became the castle Romantic Europe fell in love with. Byron wrote The Prisoner of Chillon after hearing of François Bonivard, chained for years in the vaulted dungeon cut into the rock beneath the courtyards, and Rousseau, Shelley, Hugo and Dickens all came to look. It remains the most visited historic building in Switzerland.

Bodiam is the picture-book castle — a square of curtain wall with drum towers at the corners, square towers in the middle of each side, and a broad artificial lake around it that holds the whole reflection without a ripple. Sir Edward Dalyngrigge was licensed by Richard II in 1385 to fortify against French raiding, but the flooded setting, the wide sheet of water and the show-front gatehouse tell you display was at least half the point.

Walk through the gate and there is nothing behind the face: the ranges were pulled down after the Civil War, so the interior is a roofless shell of empty window openings, which somehow makes the outside more beautiful still. Rescued from decay by John Fuller, Lord Ashcombe and finally Lord Curzon, who gave it to the National Trust in 1925.

Trakai stands on the largest of three islands in Lake Galvė, its red brick and steep tiled roofs rising straight from the water and reached by long wooden footbridges. Grand Duke Kęstutis began it in the second half of the 14th century and Vytautas the Great finished it around 1409, giving it a keep, a ducal palace round a narrow courtyard, and a gallery arcade that reads more like a residence than a stronghold.

The colour is what people remember — warm brick against blue water in summer, and in a hard winter the whole castle standing on white ice. It was rebuilt in the 1950s and 1960s on Lithuanian initiative and against Soviet resistance, restoring a building that had been a ruin since the 17th century.

Bled has the most complete view of any castle on the continent. It clings to a limestone crag more than a hundred metres above the lake, its Romanesque tower and Renaissance ranges stacked around two courtyards on ledges cut from the rock, and from the terrace the whole postcard lies below — the green water, the pilgrimage church on its little island, and the Julian Alps with Triglav behind.

It is the oldest castle in Slovenia by written record, first mentioned in 1011 when the emperor Henry II granted the estate to the bishops of Brixen, who held it for eight centuries. The castle you climb to is modest in scale; the setting is not.

Hohenzollern is a piece of 19th-century theatre placed on a genuinely spectacular hill: a lone cone rising 855 metres out of the Swabian Jura, ringed by a spiralling ramp and crowned with grey turrets and steep roofs so that the castle reads as a single crown from every road for miles. On autumn mornings when the valleys fill with fog it appears to float on a sea of cloud, which is the image that made it famous.

The present building is the third on the site — a Gothic Revival memorial to the dynasty raised between 1846 and 1867 by Friedrich August Stüler for King Frederick William IV of Prussia, after English Gothic and the châteaux of the Loire. No emperor ever lived here, but it still holds the crown of Wilhelm II.

Corvin is all verticality: a forest of buttresses, tall pointed roofs in patterned tile, oriel windows hung off the walls and a row of round towers, the whole approached across a long timber bridge carried on tall stone piers above the Zlaști stream. John Hunyadi laid it out from 1446 on an older keep, and his son Matthias Corvinus carried the work on until, by 1480, it was among the largest buildings in eastern Europe.

Inside, the Knights' Hall and the Diet Hall keep their marble columns and rib vaults. In the courtyard is the deep well local legend says was dug over fifteen years by Turkish prisoners promised their freedom for reaching water — and who, the story goes, cut an inscription into the stone saying that the castle had water but no soul. The legend is old; the inscription's meaning is disputed.

Pierrefonds is the most complete idea of a medieval castle in France, which is exactly what it is — an idea. Louis of Orléans had the real fortress rebuilt from 1393, Richelieu's troops took it and began demolishing it in 1617, and it stood a great romantic ruin until Napoleon III handed it to Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1857. He restored it and, where the evidence ran out, invented: eight massive towers named for the Nine Worthies of chivalry, carved corbels and machicolations, and steep slate roofs the colour of a storm.

The result sits above the village on the edge of the forest of Compiègne, north-east of Paris — sharper, taller and more perfectly medieval than any castle that actually survived the Middle Ages, and one of the most filmed buildings in Europe for exactly that reason.

Leeds floats. The castle occupies two islands in the River Len, with the main range on the larger and the gloriette — the little royal apartment block Edward I's queen, Eleanor of Castile, gave the castle its lake for — set out on the smaller, joined by a bridge so that stone appears to stand in open water on every side. The description 'the loveliest castle in the world' is generally credited to the historian Lord Conway, and it has stuck for a century.

There has been a castle on the islands since 857, rebuilt in stone by the Norman de Crevecoeurs from 1119; Henry VIII kept Catherine of Aragon here, and much of what stands is an early-19th-century rebuild in the older manner. Its last private owner, Olive, Lady Baillie, left it in trust, and it has been open to visitors since 1976.

Dunnottar is the most dramatic ruin in Britain: a whole complex of buildings — keep, chapel, lodgings, stables — spread across the grassy top of a rock stack that falls sheer to the North Sea on every side, joined to the cliffs by a single narrow neck with a steep path cut into it. In a haar the stack disappears and only the tower shows above the mist.

The headland was fortified centuries before the present stones; the Annals of Ulster record sieges here in 681 and 694. It became the seat of the Keiths, Earls Marischal, and is best known as the place where the Honours of Scotland — the crown, sceptre and sword of state — were kept from Cromwell's army through an eight-month siege in 1651–52 and smuggled out before the surrender.

Almourol has the purest setting of any castle in Iberia — a granite islet eighteen metres high in the middle of the Tagus, just below the mouth of the Zêzere, with the river running past the walls on both sides. Nine tall round towers ring the lower enclosure and a three-storey keep rises out of the higher one, so the whole rock reads as a single ship of stone.

It was rebuilt from 1171 for the Knights Templar as part of the defensive line of the Reconquista, and an inscription over the main gate records the work of the master Gualdim Pais. The 19th century fell in love with it, restorations in the 1940s and 1950s tidied it into an official residence of the Republic, and it is still reached the only way it ever was — by boat from the bank.

Karlštejn is built as a ladder. The burgrave's house, the Marian tower and the Great Tower climb one behind the other up a wooded limestone ridge above the Berounka valley, each stage higher and more sacred than the last, so that the castle rises out of the trees in tiers of white wall and red roof. It was founded in 1348 by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, who supervised the design himself.

The summit holds the Chapel of the Holy Cross, finished in 1365 to guard the imperial regalia and the crown jewels of Bohemia: walls set with more than two thousand polished semi-precious stones, a gilded vault, and 129 painted panels of saints by Master Theodoric. Nothing else of the 14th century looks quite like it.

Miramare was built between 1856 and 1860 for the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, younger brother of the Austrian emperor, who chose a bare limestone promontory running into the Gulf of Trieste and had a white castle set on the very end of it. The sea surrounds it on three sides, the stone is Istrian limestone that glares almost blue-white in Adriatic light, and twenty-two hectares of park were planted around it with trees brought in from across the world.

Maximilian left it to take the throne of Mexico and was executed there in 1867; his wife Charlotte lost her mind. The apartments are preserved as they were furnished, and the melancholy of that story clings to the prettiest seaside castle in Italy.

Moszna is what happens when a fortune meets no restraint. The Tiele-Winckler family, Silesian coal and iron magnates, took over the estate in 1866 and extended a baroque palace outward and upward in every historical style at once — a neo-Gothic east wing, a neo-Renaissance west, and above it all a bristling roofscape of steep red gables, pinnacles and turrets counted, by tradition, at ninety-nine.

It stands about thirty kilometres south of Opole in a park planted with rhododendrons and azaleas, mirrored in its ornamental water. The Red Army occupied it briefly in 1945, and after decades as a convalescent home the restored castle, chapel and orangery are open to visitors.

Castell Coch — the red castle — is a small, perfect thing: three round towers with tall conical roofs, half-hidden in beech woods on a steep slope above the Taff, so that it appears from the valley road exactly the way a castle appears in a children's book. Gilbert de Clare rebuilt a Norman castle here in stone in the 1260s; it was probably wrecked in the Welsh rising of 1314 and left a red sandstone ruin.

In the 1870s the 3rd Marquess of Bute, then one of the richest men in Britain, set the architect William Burges to raise it again as a summer retreat. Burges kept the footings and invented the rest — and then filled it with the most sumptuous High Victorian interiors in Wales, including Lady Bute's domed bedroom and a drawing room painted with butterflies, birds and the fables of Aesop. Bute even replanted a vineyard on the slope below.

Coca is made of brick, and that is the whole beauty of it. Raised in the 15th century for the Fonseca archbishops of Seville by Mudéjar craftsmen — Muslim builders working under Christian rule — it marries Gothic military planning to Moorish ornament: rose-pink walls patterned in relief, octagonal corner turrets bristling with little spires, a horseshoe of blind arcading, and the alfiz border framing the gate arch.

Its three tiers of defence — a rock-cut moat, two rings of curtain wall and the Torre del Homenaje on the north — are all in the same warm brick, so the whole castle glows at either end of a Castilian day. It fell into disrepair badly enough that administrators sold off its columns and marble to pay for the upkeep; eight of the balustrade columns were bought back in 1952.

Egeskov rises directly out of a small lake, built in 1554 by Frands Brockenhuus on a raft of oak piles driven into the bed — the name means oak forest, and tradition holds that a whole wood was felled for the foundations. Two long red-brick ranges are joined by a thick central double wall, with round towers at the corners and stepped gables above, and the still water carries the entire building upside down beneath itself.

It was built to fight as well as to impress, in the unrest that followed the Count's Feud and the Reformation, with gun loops and a double wall that let one half hold out if the other fell. The counts Ahlefeldt-Laurvig-Bille have held it since 1882 and still live in part of it; the rest, and the gardens, are open.

Ashford is the most beautiful thing the Guinness money ever built. The core is a genuine 1228 stronghold of the Anglo-Norman de Burgos on the shore of Lough Corrib, with a 17th-century French-styled hunting lodge grafted on by the Brownes; from 1852 Sir Benjamin Guinness and then his son Lord Ardilaun wrapped the whole thing in neo-Gothic ranges, turrets and battlements and laid out the woods, drives and gardens around it.

The result is a long grey silhouette of towers and crenellations standing above its own lawns with the lake behind and the mountains of Connemara beyond — and, since the estate became a hotel, one of the few castles on this list you can sleep in.