Sigmaringen

Sigmaringen is a castle with a town attached. The Hohenzollern schloss erupts from a sheer rock in a bend of the young Danube — one of Germany's most theatrical castle silhouettes — and within its walls the Swabian, Catholic line of the dynasty kept court: the princes of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, whose son Karl accepted a foreign crown in 1866 and founded the royal house of Romania. The state rooms parade portraits, tapestries and one of Europe's largest private arms collections — halls of armour from four centuries — while the French salons remember a stranger chapter: from autumn 1944 the castle housed the Vichy government in exile, Pétain and his ministers waiting out the war's end above the Danube; Céline, swept along as physician, turned the grotesque episode into his novel Castle to Castle.

The town below lives at the castle's pace: the Baroque Johanniskirche pressed against the rock, the princely Hofgarten, breweries and markets, the Prinzengarten's roses. Upstream begins one of Germany's noblest landscapes — the Upper Danube Nature Park, where the river has sawn a limestone gorge of white cliffs, beech woods and clifftop monasteries; canoeists and cyclists follow the young Danube through scenery it will not equal again before the Iron Gates.

A dynasty's second home, a river's first masterpiece, and a small residence town keeping both in order: Sigmaringen distils princely Swabia to a single, castle-crowned bend.