Waldburg Castle

The castle occupies a prominent drumlin with steep slopes that provided a defensive advantage and long-range views across the surrounding landscape, including Hohentwiel, Ulm Minster, the Alpine foothills, Lake Constance and the Swiss Alps. The core group of buildings stands within closely linked defensive walls: the principal residential block, the chapel tower and a service building are connected by curtain walls, and a high shield wall between the main block and the chapel tower supports a covered wall-walk.

A ring wall closely follows the north and west sides of the drumlin. The approach from the west climbs steeply along the original castle road and reaches a crenellated entrance gate that is open today. Work carried out on the outer enclosure in 1996 revealed massive late 11th-century foundations in the courtyard, demonstrating the smaller size of the initial complex and the survival of early masonry beneath later phases.

The main residential block preserves substantial elements from the Staufer rebuilding. On its lower floors dressed corner ashlar blocks remain up to the second storey. The original access to the ground floor was by a round-arched gateway on the east side, and the lower levels show narrow slit openings while the representative floor once contained multi-part pointed-arch windows. The 16th-century reworking subdivided each upper storey and the ground floor into three principal rooms with a broad central corridor; the exterior from that period shows regularly spaced, sandstone-framed mullioned windows and a carved sandstone entrance portal with pilasters and leaf ornament.

Vertical circulation survives in robust stone form, including a spiral staircase with a stone core executed by a Konstanz stonemason, and a latrine tower on the west façade that provided sanitary access from the principal floors. The chapel tower began as a lower, smaller gate-tower with a large northern opening and was raised in stages, notably around 1323 and again in 1401, before being linked to the main block at the level of the second upper floor by a covered passage. Higher added storeys include irregular window placements with tuff stone surrounds; the exterior plaster still shows traces where external openings and wooden stair accesses were later blocked.

The roof of the main residential block is a saddle roof dating to roughly 1686, while some roof timbers have been dated to 1399. The chapel contains later movable and painted fittings, including stucco decoration, a ceiling painting of St. Waldburga and a Flora fresco in the chaplain’s apartment by Johann Gabriel Roth, and a late-19th-century enhancement to an older winged altarpiece that introduced a neo-Gothic mensa, predella and sculptures of three house saints. The site retains large parts of its medieval fabric in situ, and an accessible roof platform still preserves the trigonometrical point installed during the early 19th-century surveying work.