Flehingen Castle

Flehingen Water Castle is a Renaissance-era water castle in Flehingen, a district of the municipality of Oberderdingen in the Karlsruhe district in northwestern Baden-Württemberg. For a long time, it was the ancestral seat of the Lords of Flehingen.

A castle at the same location was already mentioned in 1353. This castle, along with the village of Flehingen, was sold in 1366 to the noble free Lords of Strahlenberg, from whom Elector Ruprecht I of the Palatinate acquired Flehingen and Sickingen in 1368. The lordship came as a fief to the Lords of Flehingen in 1396. The current castle building was constructed around 1565 by Ludwig Wolf von Flehingen (1517–1600) and his wife Anna, née Göler von Ravensburg, using existing wall sections of the lower castle, which had been burned down in 1504 during the Landshut War of Succession by Count Ulrich of Württemberg. After 1636, the manorial lordship and the castle passed to the Counts Wolff-Metternich zur Gracht. In 1803, Flehingen came into the possession of the Grand Duchy of Baden, but the castle remained in the possession of the Wolff-Metternich zur Gracht. In 1876, the castle was sold to the municipality of Flehingen for 550,000 Marks. In 1894, the Baden state acquired the castle to establish an educational institution there. In 1904 and 1905, the interior rooms of the castle were converted for this purpose. Today, it is used as an educational center by the "Kommunalverband für Jugend und Soziales Baden-Württemberg (KVJS)". Furthermore, the castle houses four state-recognized vocational schools.