Every castle worth the climb. And what the gate costs.
Which Alcazar ticket skips the queue in Seville. Whether Neuschwanstein is better from Munich or from Fussen. What a day at Bran and Peles really includes. Reviews of the castle tours you can actually book.
Four castles that carry a whole trip.
A Moorish palace, a Transylvanian pair, a Bavarian folly and a rock over a capital city. What each costs to get inside, and what people who queued say about it.
01The Moorish oneRoyal Alcázar Entry TicketMudejar courtyards and the gardens behind them, on a timed entry ticket. Take the first slot of the morning; the patios empty out and the tilework holds the cool.
02The two-castle dayDracula’s Castle, Peles Castle, & Brasov Old TownBran and Peles in one run out of Bucharest, with Brasov old town wedged in between. Long day, one minibus, both castles ticked.
03The fairytale oneNeuschwanstein & Linderhof Castle Full-Day TripNeuschwanstein plus Linderhof from Munich. Ludwig built one to be photographed and the other to be lived in, and the contrast is the point.
04The rockEdinburgh Castle: Guided Walking Tour with Entry TicketEdinburgh Castle with a guide and the entry included. The guide matters here: without one the esplanade is just a view.
Four British castles, four completely different days out.
Britain puts a castle within an hour of most of its cities, and they are not interchangeable. A garrison on a volcanic plug, a working royal residence, a Norman keep in the middle of London, and the long Highland drive. What it costs to walk into each.
Six countries that built more of them than anywhere else.
Border country, coronation country and the places that kept fighting long enough to need the walls. Each one opens on the castle days we have reviewed there.
The best castles are an hour past the last tram stop.
Almost nobody built a fortress in a city centre, which is why the castle day is usually a day trip: a coach at eight, a mountain road, two hours inside the walls and a sleep on the way back. These are the ones that fill first.
Spain calls them alcazares, and they are the best-preserved in Europe.
Everything in Spain →
Eight centuries of Moorish building, then Christian kings who liked it too much to knock it down. Seville, Cordoba and Segovia keep the three best, and all three sell timed tickets that run out before you land.
Entry only, or entry with a guide
The plain ticket gets you through the gate and leaves you to it. The guided version explains why a Christian king commissioned Muslim craftsmen, which is the whole story of the building. Worth the extra if you only see one.
Alcazar, cathedral and the Giralda
Seville sells the palace and the cathedral together, and the queue for each is separately miserable. The combined pass is the only sensible way to do both in a morning, and it puts the Giralda climb on the end.
Cordoba, and the fortress of the kings
The Alcazar de los Reyes Cristianos has the gardens Seville is famous for and about a fifth of the crowd. Pair it with the Mezquita and the Jewish quarter and the whole thing takes a morning.
More travellers walk through these nine gates than any others.
The whole catalogue of walls →Nine products carry an outsized share of the demand. Here is what each one actually gets you through the door of, and what it costs.
1
Royal Alcázar Entry Ticket
Enter Seville’s Royal Alcázar through the online ticket line at Puerta del León and explore at your own pace for one day. You’ll see Moorish design, Christian royal rooms, tiled courtyards, expansive gardens, and Game of Thrones filming locations. This is an entry ticket, not a guided tour. An audio guide may be available by QR code, with your phone and headphones.
From · $23
Read our review →
2
Stonehenge, Windsor Castle, and Bath from London
from $111
3
Dracula’s Castle, Peles Castle, & Brasov Old Town
from $40
4
Neuschwanstein & Linderhof Castle Full-Day Trip
from $94
5
Edinburgh Castle: Guided Walking Tour with Entry Ticket
from $49
6
Alcázar, Cathedral & Giralda Skip-the-Line Tour
from $64
7
Castle Tour with Local Guide and Entry Ticket
from $61
8
Prague Castle 2.5-Hour Tour Including Admission Ticket
from $57
9
Dublin to Belfast Black Cab, Dunluce Castle and Giant’s Causeway
from $96
Romania sells Dracula and hands you Peles instead. Take both.
Bran is small, steep and famous for a novel that never once describes it. Peles, forty minutes away, is one of the most extravagant interiors in Europe and barely gets a postcard. Almost every day trip out of Bucharest does the pair, and the pair is the right answer.
Every Romanian castle day →
The real price of a morning behind the walls.
Every reviewed tour grouped by price. A surprising number of the best gates cost less than the lunch you eat afterwards.
Entry tickets, old-town walks up to the keep, and the self-guided audio versions.
The standard castle day trip: coach out, guide inside, two castles if you are lucky.
Private guides, chauffeured Highland runs and the multi-castle days that eat a whole date.
The Loire built two hundred chateaux because the court kept moving.
Chambord has four hundred rooms and a double staircase nobody has ever fully explained. Chenonceau sits on the river. Carcassonne, six hours south, is the one that still looks like a war. Day trips run from Paris, but the valley rewards a night in Tours.
- 1Loire Valley Castles Day Trip from Paris with Complementary Winefrom $149
- 2Castle and Ramparts Entry Ticketfrom $15
- 3Entry Ticket to the Castlefrom $24
Three castles with no equivalent anywhere else.
Towers on hills are universal. A king who bankrupted himself building a stage set, a fortress wedged into the mouth of a cave, and wooden keeps that survived four hundred years of earthquakes are not.
Neuschwanstein
Ludwig II started it in 1869 as a private stage for Wagner and died before the top floors were finished. Fewer than twenty rooms were ever completed, and the tour moves through them on a fixed thirty-five-minute track with a timed slot printed on the ticket. The famous view is from Marienbrucke, a footbridge behind the castle that closes whenever the ice makes it unsafe.
- 1Neuschwanstein & Linderhof Castle Full-Day Trip★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 14,646 reviews
- 2Premium Neuschwanstein Castle and Linderhof VIP Tour from Munich★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 2,480 reviews
- 3Neuschwanstein Castle Full-Day Trip by Van★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 1,177 reviews
Predjama, in the cave mouth
A castle built into the opening of a cliff cave, with tunnels running out of the back of it into the hill. A fifteenth-century knight held a siege here for a year because supplies came up the tunnel. It is usually sold with Postojna Cave twenty minutes away, and the combined ticket is cheaper than the two separately.
- 1Postojna Cave & Predjama Castle Tickets and Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 2,146 reviews
- 2Slovenia in One Day: Lake Bled, Postojna Cave and Predjama Castle★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 879 reviews
- 3Postojna Cave & Predjama Castle – Shore Excursion from Rijeka★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 10 reviews
The keeps that survived
Japan had more than a hundred castles and twelve original keeps are left standing. The rest are postwar concrete rebuilds, which is not a criticism so much as a thing to know before you buy the ticket. Nijo-jo in Kyoto keeps its nightingale floors, boards deliberately built to squeak under an assassin.
- 1Osaka Castle: Museum and Tower Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 2,380 reviews
- 2Nijo-jo Castle and Ninomaru Palace Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 1,020 reviews
- 3Nijo Castle, Kiyomizu & Fushimi Inari Guided Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 700 reviews
Four castles that will not let you in on the day.
Most of this is walk-up. These four run on capped slots printed with a time on them, and in high season the morning slots are gone weeks out. Turning up at the gate without one is a wasted journey, not a queue.
- 01Royal Alcázar Entry TicketSeville caps entry per half hour and sells out days ahead through summer. The gate turns away anything without a printed slot.
- 02Neuschwanstein & Linderhof Castle Full-Day TripEvery visit is a guided thirty-five-minute track with a stamped start time. Miss it by ten minutes and the ticket is dead.
- 03Wawel Castle & Cathedral Guided TourThe state rooms and the cathedral sell separate capped tickets, and the daily allocation for the royal apartments is small.
- 04Castle Tour with Local Guide and Entry TicketSecurity screening at the gate runs a queue of its own before the ticket office even starts. The skip-the-line versions exist for a reason.
Half the castles in Europe are shut on the day you turn up.
Castle opening is not like a museum. Most close one weekday, plenty shut entirely from November to March, working royal residences close at no notice for state business, and a good number of the best interiors are only enterable with a guide. The fix is the same everywhere: book the guided slot, and keep the grounds as the fallback.
Cairo, Kyoto, Chapultepec and the Ghanaian coast.
Saladin fortified Cairo against crusaders and the citadel is still the best view in the city. Mexico built a hilltop castle for an emperor who lasted three years. The forts on the Cape Coast were built for the slave trade and are visited for exactly that reason.
Prague to Bucharest: the castle run that sells itself.
Prague
Budapest
Krakow
Brasov
BranBy country and city
By kind of castle day
The newest castle reviews on the site.
The rest of this month’s walls →
3 hour: Warsaw Old Town with Royal Castle /inc. Pick-up/
Read our review →
Guided Bratislava & Devín Castle Tour via Hainburg
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Bratislava: DayTrip: Castles around Vienna +underground lake
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Everyday Chopin Concert at 7 PM with candlelight by the Castle
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Gdansk and Malbork Castle Small Group Tour from Warsaw with Lunch
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Lucerne CH Experience: Cheese, Chocolate, Chapel Bridge & Château
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Day Trip to Montreux, Chaplin’s World & Chillon Castle& apéritif
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Bratislava with Local Guide, Castle & UFO Views
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Beyond Seoul: Starfield Library, Hwaseong Fortress & Cave Quest
Read our review →