Burg Kempen

Burg Kempen stands in the north-eastern part of the Lower-Rhenish town of Kempen, within the Kreis Viersen. Built as a state castle for the Archbishops of Cologne, it once guarded the north-western edge of their territory. The medieval core survives better than any other Cologne castle from the 14th century, with much of its original fabric still visible.

The fortress is worth the journey because it shows how a 14th-century stronghold was later reshaped. In the late 14th century Johann Hundt, parish sexton and later bailiff, rebuilt it under Archbishop Friedrich von Saarwerden, adding the two wings and the corner towers. A 17th-century Renaissance makeover by Ferdinand of Bavaria gave it a palatial look, but a mid-19th-century fire removed most of that grandeur and left the building in its present castle form.

Visitors walk across a four-arched stone bridge over the dry moat to the 20-metre-high pointed portal tower. Inside, a ribbed cross vault and a double coat of arms in Tuffstein mark the entrance. The longer west wing, once home to a chapel with a narrow lancet window, now hosts adult education classes. Three round towers of different thicknesses stand at the corners, each with Blaustein window frames and steep spiral stairs barely 0.65 metres wide. The outer walls and the surviving stretch of the inner moat still show the scale of the original defences.