Wasserschloss Sandizell

Wasserschloss Sandizell stands beside the small village of Sandizell, a part of Schrobenhausen in Upper Bavaria. The castle is the ancestral seat of the Counts of Sandizell and carries medieval and early modern traces in its fabric. Its Renaissance core, rebuilt after Swedish fires in the Thirty Years War, still shows the surviving east wing. A later 18th-century rebuilding by Johann Puchtler added a two-storey chapel in the south wing and a gate tower in 1763. The castle’s history touches wider events: in 1704 the allied commanders Eugen of Savoy and Marlborough met here to plan the battle of Höchstädt. The adjoining Hofmarkskirche, begun by Johann Baptist Gunetzrhainer in 1735, was completed with a tower by Leonhard Matthäus Giessl twenty-one years later. Inside, the high altar by Egid Quirin Asam and the family tombs of the Sandizell counts remain notable works. Today the castle is divided between two families. The west half belongs to Nikolaus Graf von und zu Sandizell, while the east half was taken over by the Jaeck family in 1970 and carefully restored. The owners live in parts of the building and let sections for events and weddings. The English landscape park laid out in the 1870s remains private, but the church is open as the parish church of St Peter for local worship.