Nuremberg appears in the records as royal property in 1050. The castle on the rock was two castles for most of the Middle Ages — the emperor’s and the burgrave’s — until the city bought the burgraves out between 1422 and 1427 and became, in effect, its own landlord. The Palas, the great hall block, went up from about 1200 together with the chapel; it was first substantially rebuilt at the end of the 13th century.
The Doppelkapelle is the reason to come and the oldest thing you can stand in. It is two chapels of identical plan stacked on top of each other, with an opening in the middle of the floor so that one congregation could hear the service in the other. The lower Margaretenkapelle has stout, heavy columns; the upper Kaiserkapelle has four remarkably slender columns of marble-like limestone. On the west side is the ruler’s gallery, which kept the emperor above and apart from his court and gave him a level walk straight into his own chambers; a heated oratory was built into it for Charles V in 1520. The crucifix is attributed to Veit Stoss. The building survived the Second World War, in the Bavarian Palace Department’s own words, “almost undamaged”, along with its choir tower and the Sinwell tower next door. The Palas did not: its upper floor was torn away, and Rudolf Esterer rebuilt it after 1945, lengthening the hall westwards by about a third.
The Sinwellturm — Middle High German for something like “mightily round” — was built in the second half of the 13th century, is 41 m high, and gained an extra storey and its pointed helm in the 1560s. A wooden stair inside goes to the platform; there is a photographic exhibition on the destruction of castle and city on the way up.
The Tiefer Brunnen is a shaft driven over 50 m into bedrock, first documented in the 14th century, with the sandstone parapet added in the 16th. It can only be seen on a short guided demonstration, included in the ticket, in which a camera is lowered down the shaft. The castle garden and the Maria Sibylla Merian garden are free.
