Altrathen Castle (german: Burg Altrathen) is located on a rock outcrop near

Rathen Rathen is a village in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, in Saxony, Germany, about southeast of Dresden. The village occupies both banks of the river Elbe and, as of 2020, has 339 inhabitants. Rathen is a popular tourist destination, the main sigh ...

Saxon Switzerland Saxon Switzerland (german: Sächsische Schweiz) is a hilly climbing area and national park around the Elbe valley south-east of Dresden in Saxony, Germany. Together with the Bohemian Switzerland in the Czech Republic it forms the Elbe Sands ...

in the German state of

Saxony Saxony (german: Sachsen ; Upper Saxon: ''Saggsn''; hsb, Sakska), officially the Free State of Saxony (german: Freistaat Sachsen, links=no ; Upper Saxon: ''Freischdaad Saggsn''; hsb, Swobodny stat Sakska, links=no), is a landlocked state of ...

History

Unlike the neighbouring

Neurathen Castle Neurathen Castle (german: Felsenburg Neurathen), which was first mentioned by this name in 1755,http://www.raubschlösser.de/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=84&Itemid=64 is located near the famous Bastei rocks near Rathen in Saxon Sw ...

, very little is known about the history of this fortification. It was probably built at the same time in the 11th century. The castle was first mentioned in the records in 1289. In 1469, Altrathen and Neurathen castles were

slighted Slighting is the deliberate damage of high-status buildings to reduce their value as military, administrative or social structures. This destruction of property sometimes extended to the contents of buildings and the surrounding landscape. It is ...

. In 1888, the industrialist Eduard Seifert bought the ruins of the castle and rebuilt it in 1893 in a

Neogothic Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

style. Of the medieval castle, only the cellars and parts of the

spiral staircase Stairs are a structure designed to bridge a large vertical distance between lower and higher levels by dividing it into smaller vertical distances. This is achieved as a diagonal series of horizontal platforms called steps which enable passage ...

of the

keep A keep (from the Middle English ''kype'') is a type of fortified tower built within castles during the Middle Ages by European nobility. Scholars have debated the scope of the word ''keep'', but usually consider it to refer to large towers in c ...

have survived. After 1945 the building acted as a works holiday home for the VEB Brau und Malz in Dresden and later for the East German

state bank A state bank is generally a financial institution that is chartered by a federated state, as opposed to one regulated at the federal or national level. State banks differ from a reserve bank in that it does not necessarily control monetary policy ...

. In 1995 the site was sold by the ''

Treuhandanstalt The ("Trust agency"), colloquially referred to as , was an agency established by the government of the German Democratic Republic to reprivatise/privatise East German enterprises, Volkseigene Betriebe (VEBs), prior to German reunification. Cre ...

'' to a private owner. Since then the building has been used as a small hotel and restaurant.

Sources

* Richard Vogel: ''Werte unsere Heimat Band 1; Gebiet Königstein Sächsische Schweiz''. 2nd ed., Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1985.

External links

{{commonscat, Burg Altrathen
Website of Hotel Burg Altrathen with information about its history

Artist's reconstruction
by Wolfgang Braun Altrathen Altrathen Rathen Buildings and structures in Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge