Schönecken Castle is a ruined hill above the village of Schönecken in the Nims valley in the West Eifel mountains. The castle stands on the lowest hill ridge in the middle of a valley bowl. The site is guarded on all sides by higher hills. The castle was built around 1230.
The castle occupies a 120-metre-long rectangular site with an enceinte and three projecting towers. In the east the site is guarded by a wide neck ditch. The three towers stand on the south side, two of them being still three storeys high. The two round towers probably date to the 13th or 14th century, the central, rectangular one is more recent. All three towers and their curtain walls have been part of a multi-storey residential building since no later than the 16th century, as depicted in an 18th-century painting.
References:The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.