Johanniterschloss Kleinerdlingen

At the edge of Kleinerdlingen, a district of Nördlingen, stands the Johanniterschloss: a former castle of the Knights Hospitaller whose history reaches back to the thirteenth century, when it was first mentioned as a commandery of that order. What you see today is the core of a four-winged water castle, of which three wings survive, arranged around grounds where fragments of the old surrounding wall still hold their place.

The centuries have reshaped it repeatedly. The main building, with its distinctive octagonal corner towers, rose between 1610 and 1614, and baroque elements were layered onto it through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Secularization in 1808 ended the order's rule: Maximilian Freiherr von Welden acquired the property in 1809, and in 1842 his heirs sold it on to the brewer Joseph Bocksberger. From 1975 to 2011 the Siegling family carried out extensive restoration work, and the castle remains in family hands, still being modernized along historical models as a working cultural asset.

So the place you land on holds the whole arc in one view: a thirteenth-century commandery, a seventeenth-century water castle, a baroque residence and a carefully restored private home, all in one set of walls. Look for the octagonal corner towers first, because they anchor everything else, and let the surviving wall fragments tell you where the moat and defences once ran. It is a rare chance to read six centuries of building history in a single structure, and it rewards the time you give it.