Füssen
— — the town the castles look down on.
Not only on a wall.
“A small Bavarian town in the southern Allgäu, on the river Lech where it spills out of the Alps onto the foothills, a few kilometres from the Austrian border. The old centre climbs in painted facades from the river to the Hohes Schloss, the late-Gothic bishop's castle on the hill. Two valleys south stand the castles the town is known for now, Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau, built into the wooded ridges above the Alpsee. The Romantic Road, the old waymarked route from Würzburg, ends here. from the studio
Füssen, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Füssen is a town of about 16,000 in the Ostallgäu district of Bavaria, on the river Lech at 808 metres elevation, roughly five kilometres north of the Austrian border. It is the southern terminus of the Romantic Road, the 460-kilometre tourist route that begins in Würzburg, and the gateway town for the castles Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau. The old town climbs from the river to the late-Gothic Hohes Schloss, once the summer residence of the prince-bishops of Augsburg. The Forggensee, a large reservoir on the Lech, sits just north of town.
Two valleys south of Füssen, above the village of Hohenschwangau, stand the two castles most visitors come for. Hohenschwangau, the yellow neo-Gothic palace where Ludwig II grew up, was rebuilt by his father Maximilian II between 1832 and 1837 from a medieval ruin. Neuschwanstein, on the higher crag opposite, was commissioned by Ludwig in 1869 and left unfinished at his death in 1886, fourteen of its planned rooms ever completed. Both look out over the dark Alpsee and the Pöllat gorge. The fairy-tale silhouette of Neuschwanstein became the template for the castles of the Disney studios in the 1950s.
Füssen has a rail terminus served by direct regional trains from Munich in just over two hours. Tickets for both castles are sold through a single ticket centre in Hohenschwangau village and must be reserved in advance from spring through autumn, when day-tour coaches from Munich fill the slots quickly. The walk up to Neuschwanstein from the ticket centre takes about thirty-five minutes; the Marienbrücke, the iron footbridge over the Pöllat gorge, gives the postcard view of the castle and is closed in winter when the gorge ices. The old town of Füssen itself is walkable in an afternoon.