Burg Hohenzollern & Schloss Sigmaringen

Are Burg Hohenzollern %26amp; Schloss Sigmaringen the same castle? From reading, it seems like one is in town, and the other is high on a bluff.

We would like to see castles that have beautiful furniture, paintings, artwork, etc. rather than just ruins. So are these worth seeing? If so, what are the addresses that we can put in our GPS?

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Burg Hohenzollern ( www.burg-hohenzollern.com ) is by Hechingen and is fairytale-like, sitting atop a hill outlier of the Swabian Alb ( www.schwaebischealb.de ), low limestone mountains with a lot of castles and caves and excellent cliff-side scenery. It is the ancestral seat of the Hohenzollern family, of Prussian kings and German emperors. It was reconstructed in the mid-1800s on the site of the ancestral castle in the style of a defensive castle.

The castle/palace in Sigmaringen ( www.hohenzollern.com ) is a different palace of another branch of the Hohenzollern family and is right in Sigmaringen. This also start out as a castle, but through the years has evolved into a large palace. (Note, that a castle is a defensive fortification, a palace is a place where royalty lived.)

Both places are intact and definitely worth seeing, and the one at Sigmaringen also has a large collection of medieval armor and weapons. The Danube just west of Sigmaringen ( www.sigmaringen.de ) is idyllic in its gorge through the Alb with lots of castles and palaces perched atop the cliffs. The interior of both won%26#39;t be overly ornate.

Germany%26#39;s largest perfectly preserved Baroque palace (in www.schloesser-und-gaerten.de as also is Burg Hohenzollern) is in Ludwigsburg ( www.ludwigsburg.de ) just north of Stuttgart, called the Swabian Versailles, with the longest and best palace tour that I%26#39;ve been on in Europe, which will take you through the kings and queens%26#39; part of the palace, and also the earlier dukes%26#39; chambers and the two churches. There are four excellent museums there, the fashion museum has lots of clothes from the 1700s, the porcellan museum has many works of porcellan (both figurines and functional items) that were manufactured there and includes the chambers of the duke who started the manufacture (Ludwigsburg Porcellan celebrated their 250th annivewrsdary last year), a gallery of Baroque paintings (also the tour will have paintings of their lineage, one painting looking remarkably like England%26#39;s Queen Elizabeth who is related), and the theater museum with a fully working original mechanical stage which should also be part of the tour. Then there are the extensive gardens including even a nice fairytale one, and also the two smaller associated palaces set near a deer park (several days to see it all).

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Thanks again for the great info! Look forward to seeing all 3.

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You will like them. be aware that they involve some walking from parking lot, if that matters, esp. Hohenzollern. Also Hohenzollern has an incredible entry room with the family %26quot;tree%26quot; painted on the walls and ceilings. Amazing. It is furnished. It is also a manageable size, not too big.

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Hohenzollern only had one English tour per day when I went there, and of course I missed that. Purchased an English picture book for 5 euros and took a German tour. Interior was similar to Neuschwanstein IMHO.