Burghausen Castle
The longest castle in Europe (1,043 metres) and one of Germany's largest, it perches high above the small baroque town of Burghausen in Upper Bavaria on the Austrian border, just like in a fairytale. Its many towers have seen more than a thousand years of history. This monument to late-medieval fortress architecture is laid out like a vast picture spread. The castle's present appearance with its fortified towers, walls which are five metres thick in places, outer wards, keep, ditches, banqueting halls and drawbridges dates from the 13th to 15th centuries. It also has dark chapters in its history, as evidenced by the witches' tower and torture tower (now a museum), the "Spinnhäusl" for female prisoners and the Prechtl Tower, in which the executioner lived in the 18th century. 
Neuschwanstein is known all over the world as a symbol of idealised romantic architecture and the tragic tale of its lord. After Ludwig II's sovereignty was taken away, he withdrew into his own world of myths, legend and fairytales on a rugged mountain peak by the Pöllat gorge. He had already felt the lure of the Middle Ages as a child prince growing up in medieval Hohenschwangau Castle. When Ludwig II started construction of Neuschwanstein in 1869, he united aspects of the Wartburg, a quintessentially German castle that had only been restored a year before, with those described in the Castle of the Holy Grail from Wagner's “Parsifal”. Neuschwanstein Castle, which was only given this name after Ludwig II's death, unashamedly harks back to the German Romanesque of the 13th century. Indeed the southern wing was only completed in 1891, five years after the king's mysterious death at Lake Starnberg.
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