The complete castle
Drawbridge, armouries, kitchens, fireplaces — a working castle, not ruins.
Wrtalya — CC BY-SA 4.0 · 0x010C — CC BY-SA 4.0 · KimonBerlin — CC BY-SA 2.0 · KimonBerlin — CC BY-SA 2.0
Practically the opposite: 'authentic' castles are usually empty walls, while this one you enter and find alive — furnished, armed, kitchened. Just know you are seeing 1908's vision of the Middle Ages, not the Middle Ages themselves — and it is a masterly vision.
By car: the castle at opening, then down to Ribeauvillé or Riquewihr for lunch and a wander — vine villages with Colmar's beauty in miniature. Without a car: train to Sélestat and the seasonal bus, checking return times before you climb.
Among the most child-successful castles: drawbridge, towers, real weaponry, wall-walks. Distances inside are manageable, with a café at the gate. Just keep hold of little ones on the high walls.
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Haut-Kœnigsbourg rides a summit 750 metres over the Alsace plain, pink in its Vosges sandstone, visible for kilometres before you reach it. It guarded the wine and wheat roads for centuries, was wrecked by the Swedes, and lay in ruin for two hundred years. What you see is a complete rebuild from the early 1900s: the German Kaiser Wilhelm II — Alsace being German then — restored it as an 'ideal' medieval castle in obsessive detail, drawbridge and armouries to giant fireplaces. Some historians mock its perfection; millions of visitors thank him: this is the most complete castle you will ever walk through. From the ramparts the Alsace plain, its villages and vines run to the Black Forest — on clear days, to the Alps. Make it a half-day with a wine-road village or two.
Drawbridge, armouries, kitchens, fireplaces — a working castle, not ruins.
All Alsace in vines and villages to the Black Forest — and on clear days the Alps.
The warm rose colour that marks all Alsace's great buildings.
An imperial 'ideal' rebuild that became history in its own right.
Orschwiller, 67600 (north of Colmar)