Schloss Sinzig

Schloss Sinzig is a neo-Gothic villa in the town of Sinzig, northern Rhineland-Palatinate. It stands on a plot in the town centre, built between 1856 and 1859 for Gustav Bunge, a Cologne merchant. The villa replaced a ruined 16th-century castle whose last remains were cleared away in the 19th century. Today it houses the town’s home museum and is used for official events. The building is protected as a monument. The villa’s interiors were painted by the historian-painter Karl Christian Andreae, Bunge’s brother-in-law. His cycle of four large murals in the tower room shows scenes from local history, including Emperor Barbarossa granting mining rights to a Trier bishop. The room now serves as the civil registry’s wedding chamber. The villa passed through the Bunge and Koenigs families before being donated to the town in 1954. Its park was laid out around 1840 to plans by Peter Joseph Lenné. Visitors enter through a doorway framed by a turret that recalls a medieval castle. The rear of the building overlooks the former moat, now a landscaped hollow, where parts of the old curtain wall still rise four metres. Inside, the wedding chamber’s painted walls show German tribes watching Rhine ships and Karl the Great overseeing the building of Aachen chapel. The home museum occupies other rooms, displaying objects from Sinzig’s past.