The Zähringer Castle was the ancestral home of the House of Zähringen, which later founded lots of cities, like Freiburg, Bern, Thun, Murten, Villingen or Offenburg.
This place was inhabited since the stone age. Celts lived there and in the 4th and 5th Centuries the Alamanni remodeled the top of this outlier of the Black Forest. According to the archaeological institute of Freiburg they moved about 200,000 cubic meters of stone to build terraces and flatten the hilltop.
The name Zähringen was first mentioned some years after 1000, the first clear evidence for a castle dates from 1128. It was destroyed and rebuilt several times until its final destruction in the German Peasants' War in 1525. The remaining tower dates from the 13th Century.
Some meters below there is a lovely restaurant with the same name (Zähringer Burg) where you can sit for dinner and enjoy the sunset over the rhine valley...
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