Schloss Rosenau

Schloss Rosenau stands in the rolling countryside near Rödental in Upper Franconia. The house began as a medieval castle built before 1439 by the lords of Rosenawe. In the early 18th century it became a summer residence for Ferdinand Johann Adam von Pernau, a scholar who released chaffinches around the estate to study their song. The Saxe-Coburg family bought it back in 1805 and commissioned Karl Friedrich Schinkel to remodel the building in the Gothic Revival style between 1808 and 1817. The park was laid out as an English garden with an orangery, a sundial, a hermitage ruin, Swan Lake and Prince’s Pond. The house is famous as the birthplace of Prince Albert in 1819 and the place where he spent his boyhood years. His christening in the Marble Hall was attended by Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor, among others. Queen Victoria stayed in the room of Albert’s birth during her first visit to Coburg. Their son Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, lived at Rosenau and died there in 1900. After the First World War the estate passed from the ducal family to the Free State of Coburg and later to Bavaria. Visitors walk through the Marble Hall with its three aisles of grey marble. The lower floors display family heirlooms including a cradle said to have held Prince Albert. Upstairs rooms feature brightly painted walls and Biedermeier furniture. The park offers paths past the orangery, the Tournament Column sundial and the romantic ruins of the hermitage. Concerts are held each summer in the Marble Hall, and the orangery once housed the Museum of Modern Glass.