Castle ruins of Rauheneck

The ruined hilltop fortress of Rauheneck stands two and a half kilometres west of Baden’s town centre on a spur of the Lindkogel ridge above the Schwechat valley. It once guarded the medieval road that ran from Baden through the Helenental to Heiligenkreuz and on to the Triesting valley, working alongside Rauhenstein and Scharfeneck on the opposite bank. The site commands sweeping views over the Vienna basin and the eastern Alps. Rauheneck first appears in a charter of about 1130 when Hartung of Ruhenekke held the castle. His descendants, later known as the Tursen, encouraged settlement at the foot of the rock and collected only light dues in return for forest service. After the family died out in 1384 the Walseers took over, but the fortress was repeatedly sacked, most seriously by Serbian mercenaries of King Matthias Corvinus in 1477 and finally by the Turks in 1529. The Doblhoffs acquired the ruin in the early 19th century and opened it to visitors; Baden municipality bought the hill in 1961 and carried out repairs. The triangular six-storey keep, built in the 13th century of dressed ashlar with a later 19th-century crown of merlons, still dominates the southern bailey. Inside the main enceinte a rectangular palas and chapel survive from the same period, their walls showing original slit windows and a round-arched portal. The chapel’s apse, oriented southward, retains a late-Romanesque plaster finish and a small raised window for the west gallery. Below, the foundations of a cistern and a restored 19th-century gatehouse mark the lower ward, while a legend tells of a ghost bound to the keep until a pine that once grew from its masonry is made into a cradle for a Sunday-born child.