Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The Old Windstein Castle was built in the early 13th century on a sanding bar at 340 m above sea level above the town of Windstein (Bas-Rhin). Built by the Hohenstaufen via Abbé Petrus V of Neubourg to protect Haguenau, it becomes a fief of Empire shared between the families of Windstein, Sickingen and Schmalenstein. Its strategic role also makes it a den of robbers, causing its destruction in 1332 by Strasbourg after a siege using pirates.

Reconstructed in the 14th century despite the ban, the castle was burned in 1515 and then passed to the Dürckheim before its definitive ruin in 1676 by the French. Its architecture is divided into two sets separated by a natural ditch, with troglodytic arrangements (tank, rooms, 41 m well) and the remains of a Romanesque chapel. A working dungeon (late XIIIth–early XIVth) and a residential tower remain, while a 19th-century forest house occupies the place of the former communes.

Underground galleries, formerly attributed to local legends (linking with the New-Windstein), would be based on recent assumptions of mines dug during the siege of 1332, although their unstrategic location makes this theory questionable. Today, the site is also a well-known climbing spot, with 95 tracks rated from 4c to 8b, under ecological restrictions to protect nesting raptors.

Ranked a historic monument in 1984, the Old Windstein illustrates the evolution of the Alsatian castles, between feudal conflicts, architectural adaptations and modern reuses. Its state of ruin preserves rare traces of medieval techniques (bossages, polioorcetic) and unique developments related to the rocky topography of the Vosges du Nord.

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