Castle Map

Fortress

Zitadelle Jülich

Germany · 16th century

Founded
1545
Architect
Alessandro Pasqualini
Location
Jülich
Coordinates
50.9255°, 6.36006°
Links
Wikimedia Commons
Open on the map →Wikipedia (DE) ↗
Zitadelle Jülich in Germany
Photo: Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Description

The Zitadelle Jülich was once part of the Jülich fortress and is the most important surviving architectural monument of the town and one of the best-preserved fortresses of the bastion system in Germany. It was built in the years after 1545 as part of an ideal city of the Renaissance and is the oldest citadel north of the Alps. Its master builder was Alessandro Pasqualini. Today it presents itself as a four-pointed bastioned fortress with a circumference of about 1200 metres. The citadel is surrounded by a ditch ten metres deep and 20 to 30 metres wide, partly filled with water, from whose bottom it rises. The complex as a whole still towers above its surroundings (street level) by about five to ten metres.

Access from the town side has for some years been via the Pasqualini Bridge, across the ditch, through a postern. From the north, too, the inner courtyard is reached through such a tunnel; only here the ditch is spanned not by a bridge but by a causeway.

The citadel is the seat of the Gymnasium Zitadelle Jülich and a protected cultural property under the Hague Convention.

Fortifications of the same era that are similar in many respects are the Spandau Citadel in Berlin-Spandau and the Bavarian Wülzburg.

Machine-translated from “Zitadelle Jülich” on the German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

In the rankings

Zitadelle Jülich ranks #5,378 of 9,902 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #487 of the 927 mapped in Germany. Founded 1545, it is older than 40% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 933 atlas entries founded in the 16th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 1,525 times in the last 60 days, more than 67% of the atlas. 12 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Aachen, 26 km away. See how Germany compares in the castle statistics.

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