The ruin of Madenburg Castle is one of the biggest and oldest castle complexes in Rhineland-Palatinate. The castle was built on a cliff on the outskirts of the Palatinate Forest looking towards the Rhine rift valley.
In 1076 the Madenburg castle appears for the first time in a medieval document. Not a lot is known about the early owners of the castle, the counts of Madenburg. At a certain period it belonged to the Empire and to the Hochstift of Speyer. In 1470 Count Palatine Friedrich I. and his troops conquered Madenburg. In 1525, during the Peasants’ War, the castle was seriously damaged for the first time, but later rebuilt and renovated several times. In around 1689 French troops finally destroyed Madenburg.
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.