Muri Castle

En un regard

Le château en bref

Muri Castle stands on the Muri hill, above the church, in the residential suburbs of Bern. An older manor house probably occupied the site in the sixteenth century; the present building dates from a reconstruction in the mid-seventeenth century (around 1650–1658 according to sources) for Johann Rudolf von Diesbach, colonel of the Swiss Guards in France and later bailiff of Lenzburg, who began acquiring extensive land in the municipality from 1650. A watercolour by Albrecht Kauw from 1670 preserves its appearance: a compact building flanked by a pointed stair tower. The estate then passed to the Mülinen family (1695), to Abraham Henggi (1758), to the physician Samuel Lehmann (1825), and finally to the banker Ludwig Emanuel von Wagner, who enlarged and remodelled it in 1851–1854. It has remained in the von Ernst family since then, through successive inheritances, down to Catherine Stankiewicz-von Ernst in 1980. As a privately owned property, the castle is not open to visitors.