Darmstadt Palace

En un regard

Le château en bref

In the heart of Darmstadt, the residential palace was for centuries the seat of the landgraves and then, from 1806 to 1918, of the grand dukes of Hesse-Darmstadt. Its history begins with a moated castle built in the mid-13th century by the counts of Katzenelnbogen and mentioned in 1331. It passed to Hesse in 1479, was destroyed in 1518 by Franz von Sickingen and again in 1547 during the Schmalkaldic War, and was considerably enlarged from 1567 onwards by Landgrave George I in the Renaissance style, with moats and bastions. In 1715 Ernest Louis commissioned Louis Remy de la Fosse to design a vast four-winged Baroque palace, of which only two wings were completed around 1726, under a mansard roof, next to the 39 m bell tower erected in 1663-1671. Burnt out down to its outer walls in the bombing of September 1944, it was rebuilt by 1967. Today it houses the Schlossmuseum, founded in 1924, the German Poland Institute and part of the Technical University of Darmstadt, while the park in the former moats reopened in 2023.