Landschaftspark Schöntal

The Park Schöntal lies in the centre of Aschaffenburg, a Bavarian town on the edge of the Spessart hills. It began as a walled game reserve in the mid-15th century under Dietrich Schenk von Erbach, who built the city wall and two towers. Later, Albrecht von Brandenburg added a court kitchen garden along today’s Platanenallee, while Friedrich Karl Joseph von Erthal brought Friedrich Ludwig Sckell to turn the whole area into an English landscape garden. The garden is worth visiting for its layered history and the people who shaped it. Sckell, a leading 18th-century landscape artist, designed the park beyond the old moat and created a pond fed by the Röderbach. The ruined church of the Holy Grave, built in the 1540s for a community of Beguines, still stands in the grounds. In the 19th century the state ran a kitchen and vegetable garden here until the city took over in the 1950s and laid out lawns and tree avenues. Visitors today walk beneath plane trees planted in the 1950s and pass fragments of the old city wall with the Schenkenturm. Nearby the former orangery, built in classical style around 1900, now houses two restaurants and a cabaret stage. In spring magnolias flower beside the ruin, and blue peacocks often strut around the stonework. A large playground with water features and climbing frames sits beside the main path, while statues of Heracles and Diana recall earlier garden art.