Prime medieval real estate

If you ever find yourself wandering through the dense, deeply green expanses of the Palatinate Forest - a place that feels delightfully like the setting of a Brothers Grimm tale - you will eventually stumble upon the small spa resort of Dahn. 

And there, looming over the trees like a set of broken, prehistoric teeth, is the Dahner Burgenmassiv. This is not just one castle, which would be perfectly adequate, but three distinct medieval ruins—Altdahn, Grafendahn, and Tanstein — all crammed inexplicably onto a single, continuous ridge of red sandstone cliff. It is, by quite a margin, the largest castle complex in the entire Palatinate region. 

The whole arrangement is wonderfully absurd. Sometime in the 12th century, local nobles looked at a sheer, 200-meter-long stretch of rock and decided it was the perfect place to build a home. Because space was at a premium, they didn't just build on the rock; they built into it. They spent generations with hammers and chisels, laboriously hollowing out stable rooms, dark corridors, and dizzying staircases right out of the living mountain. Then, because medieval families were nothing if not complicated, they couldn't stop bickering over who owned what. Tanstein is the oldest, likely dating back to the early 1100s. Altdahn came next, featuring a massive 19-meter north tower and serious military pretensions. Grafendahn was slapped right in the middle in 1287, essentially acting as a spite-fence built by a rival branch of the family who wanted their own piece of the rock. 

If you thought the triple-castle sandwich of Altdahn (literally "Old Dahn") was the end of the region’s architectural eccentricities, you would be delightfully mistaken. Just about three kilometers down the road —tucked away in the dense, silent woodlands north of town — sits Burg Neudahn (literally "New Dahn").

It was built around 1240 because the local Dahn dynasty, in an admirable display of family expansion, simply ran out of space on their original rock. But then came the German Peasants' War of 1525, during which disgruntled locals showed up and thoroughly trashed the place. 

Instead of crying into their mead, the owners looked at the charred remains and decided what they really needed was a serious military upgrade. They transformed Neudahn into a state-of-the-art artillery fortress specifically designed to survive the newly fashionable invention of gunpowder. It didn't work out as planned though, because during the Palatine Succession War in 1689 the French blew the whole family estate into smithereens.