Château du Hohlandsbourg

About

Hohlandsbourg is a castle located in the territory of the municipality of Wintzenheim, near Colmar in the Upper Rhine. Built from 1279 by Sigfrid of Gundolsheim on a site already occupied by the Bronze Age, it entered the Habsburg heritage by 1289 at the latest and served as an imperial garrison. It was sold in 1410 to Lupfen, who sold it to Lazare de Schwendi in 1563, the latter launching a modernization project to adapt it to artillery.

The castle changed hands several times during the Thirty Years' War and was finally dismantled in 1637 by the French. Ranked as historic monuments in 1840, the castle remained largely abandoned until the late 1980s. A major development project was launched in 1986 on the basis of local elected representatives who wanted to make it a tourist hub that could compete with Upper Koenigsburg.

Driven by essentially economic goals, the site is realized without consideration for the archaeological site, which is partly destroyed by the excavators without prior excavations. Work on the expansion of the tourist site then continues gradually in...