Heidelberg Castle: what the castle ticket includes, and what needs a tour

The short answer

Heidelberg Castle is a ruin you enter on a castle ticket, and a set of interiors you see only on a guided tour. The castle's English visitor page says the Palace Ticket includes the funicular railway, the courtyard, the Great Tun and the German Apothecary Museum, and that guided tours cost extra. The same page says the interiors can be viewed only on a guided tour.[3]

So the first decision is not whether to buy a ticket but whether to add a tour. The courtyard, the great wine barrel and the pharmacy museum come with the ticket; the rooms inside the palace buildings do not.

What the castle is

The castle is the former residence of the counts palatine of the Rhine, who later became prince electors, and its operator's history page says it was first mentioned in 1225.[1] It is run by Staatliche Schlösser und Gärten Baden-Württemberg, the state palaces and gardens administration, whose name is on the castle site's pages.[3] Who runs which German palaces and castles is set out in who runs Germany's palaces and castles.

The operator's history page describes a series of Renaissance buildings put up by successive electors around the courtyard, among them the Gläserner Saalbau, the Ottheinrichsbau, the Friedrichsbau and the Englischer Bau.[1] The garden page traces the castle from a first residence in the thirteenth century to a representative palace, with the "Hortus Palatinus" garden added in the early seventeenth century.[2]

How it became a ruin

The castle was wrecked in stages. The operator's history page says it was repeatedly attacked and finally destroyed by the French in the War of the Grand Alliance in the late seventeenth century, and that after makeshift repairs it was badly damaged again in 1764 by two lightning strikes.[1] The garden page tells the same story with different names: the Palatinate was drawn into the Thirty Years' War and the Nine Years' War, French troops blasted the walls, the electors moved their residence to Mannheim in the eighteenth century, and the repaired buildings were burned out by lightning in 1764.[2] XTOUR's reading is that the two pages describe the same late-seventeenth-century war under two of its names.

The ruin then became the point. The operator says that in the nineteenth century the castle came to stand for Romanticism and was raised to a national monument.[1] Around 1900, its garden page says, a "monumental dispute" broke out over rebuilding it; the preservationists won, the castle was kept as a ruin, and only the Friedrich's Wing was completed in the Historicism style and refurnished.[2]

What the castle ticket includes

The English visitor page lists four things under the Palace Ticket: the funicular railway, the courtyard, the Great Tun and the German Apothecary Museum.[3] The German price page, which calls it the Schlossticket, is more precise about the funicular: it includes the return trip on the Bergbahn to the castle.[4] The English visitor-experience page describes it only as "a ride up to the castle on the Mountain Railway".[5]

Not everything is in it. Guided tours of the interiors are charged in addition, and so is the audioguide, according to the visitor page. The annual ticket covers the courtyard, the barrel and the museum but explicitly excludes the funicular.[4][3]

The operator's directions page describes the public-transport approach as a bus from Heidelberg central station, line 33 or 20, to the "Bergbahn" stop, and then the funicular up to the "Schloss" station.[8] XTOUR has no routing data and does not publish travel times.

The Great Tun

The operator's highlights panel presents the great wine barrel under the heading "The Barrel Building" and gives its capacity as 220,000 litres of wine.[1] It is part of the castle ticket.[3]

The operator's own pages use several names for it. The English visitor page calls it the "Great Tun" in the ticket list, the "large barrel cellar" in the opening times and the "Great Barrel" under the annual ticket; the German page calls it "das Große Fass".[4][3] They all mean the same attraction.

The German Apothecary Museum

The museum is inside the castle, in the basement of the Ottheinrichsbau, and its entry is included in the castle ticket, according to the castle's page on it. It covers the history of pharmacy from antiquity to the twenty-first century, with about 1,000 remedies on show and complete interiors of historic pharmacies from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.[6]

The naming varies here too: the English visitor page says "German Apothecary Museum" in the ticket list and "German Pharmacy Museum" under the annual ticket.[3] XTOUR has not read a page that says who runs the museum, and it publishes no separate record for it.

Since 2019, the castle's German page says, the museum has also run a pharmacy garden in a part of the grounds that is not open to the public, which can be seen only on a tour booked through the museum.[6]

The interiors and the garden

The interiors are tour-only. The visitor page says so plainly, lists separate tour times in German and English, and charges for the tour on top of the castle ticket.[3] The German notes page names the interior spaces a wheelchair can reach on a tour: the Königssaal, the castle chapel, the Gläserner Saalbau, the Ottheinrichsbau and the ground floor of the Ruprechtsbau.[7]

The castle garden, the remains of the Hortus Palatinus, is listed on the visitor page as open to the public during daylight hours.[3] The operator's history page says the garden was never completed, and that only terraces and other traces now hint at its scale.[1] XTOUR has not read a statement saying whether entering the garden needs the castle ticket.

Access, as the operator states it

The castle's German notes page describes the grounds as only partly accessible without barriers. It says the visitor centre and the main part of the garden can be fully used by people with reduced mobility, that the cobbled courtyard is difficult with a wheelchair or walker, and that the Altan terrace is easily reached.[7] XTOUR has not verified any of this and publishes no accessibility information of its own.

What XTOUR does not know

XTOUR does not publish prices, opening hours, tour times, last-entry times, waiting times or crowd levels for Heidelberg Castle. The operator publishes prices and times on its visitor page and its German price page. XTOUR does not sell castle tickets.

For the town below the castle, see the Heidelberg destination page.