Most people assume the Hall of Mirrors at Linderhof Palace copies Versailles. It doesn't. Schloss Linderhof, in the Ammergau Alps of Bavaria, is the only large palace King Ludwig II lived to see finished. Its Hall of Mirrors, the Spiegelsaal, was finished by 1877. Where it really comes fr

Before there was a palace at Sanssouci, there was a vineyard. In 1744 Frederick the Great had the bare southern slope above Potsdam cut into six terraces and planted with vines and figs. The palace rose on top between 1745 and 1747. The details: • six broad terraces with curved retaining wal

This courtyard at the Château de Pierrefonds looks late medieval. It was rebuilt between 1857 and 1885. The real castle: • built about 1396–1407 for Louis I, Duke of Orléans, at the edge of the Compiègne Forest • eight great towers, each named for one of the Nine Worthies • Louis was murdered

The stone footbridge to Eilean Donan Castle is the shot everyone takes. It is also one of the newest parts of the view. The island: • a small tidal island where three sea lochs meet: Loch Duich, Loch Long and Loch Alsh • near Dornie, about eight miles east of Kyle of Lochalsh, on the road to S

Drachenburg Castle went up in two years, 1882 to 1884, on the slope of the Drachenfels above the Rhine. It looks medieval. It is a stockbroker's house. The man behind it: • Stephan Sarter, born in Bonn in 1833, the son of an innkeeper • trained in Cologne banking, then traded on his own ac

More than a million pieces of glass and gold mosaic line one room at Wartburg Castle. They went up between 1902 and 1906, for a saint who had left the castle more than 670 years earlier. The Wartburg crowns a sandstone ridge above Eisenach in Thuringia. Elisabeth, daughter of the King of Hungary

The official record still says the Civil War wrecked Bodiam Castle. The historian who made that story famous took it back in 1871. Bodiam rises out of a broad sheet of still water in the Rother valley of East Sussex, near Robertsbridge. From outside it looks finished. Inside the curtain there is

July 4, 1189. Henry II of England, harried and outmaneuvered, submitted to Philip II Augustus of France in the settlement remembered as the Peace of Colombiers. Two days later he was dead at Chinon. Colombiers was the fortress that stood where the Château de Villandry stands now, on the valley f