Schloss Umkirch

Schloss Umkirch stands in the village of Umkirch, twelve kilometres west of Freiburg in the Breisgau-Hochschwarzwald district. A fourteenth-century water-burgh was replaced by a Renaissance palace whose central section was rebuilt in 1743 and the two wings added between 1788 and 1789. Flora von Kageneck enlarged the estate and remodelled the house in Italian villa style, adding a belvedere whose gable still bears the Kageneck-Wrbna coat of arms. The palace passed to Stéphanie de Beauharnais, grand duchess of Baden, in 1827 and became the summer home of her daughter Josephine, who married into the Hohenzollern family. Their son, King Carol I of Romania, made Umkirch his family’s hereditary seat in 1887. After his death the estate went to the Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen line and was used as a summer residence until the Second World War. During the war the family were evicted, and after 1945 the French military governor occupied the house until 1952. The eleven-hectare landscape park surrounding the palace contains a second park to the south, Fulwell-Park, created by Princess Auguste Viktoria of Hohenzollern. This neo-baroque pleasure ground was later renamed Queen-Auguste-Victoria-Park and now belongs to a publisher. The entire grounds, awarded the European Garden-Culture Creation Prize in 2002, offer shaded walks, open lawns and views across the Rhine valley towards the Black Forest.