Tiefburg Castle

The Tiefburg, also known as Handschuhsheim Castle, is the ruin of a medieval moated castle in Heidelberg-Handschuhsheim in northwestern Baden-Württemberg.

The castle is located as a low-lying castle within the village, northwest of the former village center of Handschuhsheim. The castle was once surrounded by a moat fed by the Mühlenbach stream. At the northeast corner of the complex, the walled-up inflow to the moat is still visible. After its drainage, the connecting channel was used as access to the neighboring manor. The surrounding wall of the entire complex has been fragmentarily preserved in the surrounding properties.

The oldest noble residence in Handschuhsheim was probably located on a western spur of the Heiligenberg in the Bürgel district. According to old traditions, vaults and walls of a castle were once located there. Whether this castle ever existed and when it was abandoned is as unknown as the origin of the Tiefburg. The latter, however, existed at the latest in the 13th century. From traditions of the 13th and 14th centuries, it appears that it was a moated castle, surrounded by a 12-meter-wide moat, fed by the Mühlenbach.

The quadrangle of the defensive walls and the barrel vaults of the cellars still date from the High Middle Ages, while the rest of the complex shows features of the Renaissance, suggesting a major renovation of the castle between 1500 and 1600. The coats of arms visible on the balcony parapets of the outer walls from 1544 date this renovation more precisely.

The castle was the ancestral seat of the Lords of Handschuhsheim. After they died out in the male line in 1600, the castle passed to the Lords of Helmstatt in 1624, in whose possession the castle remained for more than three centuries.

From the Thirty Years' War to the War of the Palatine Succession, the castle suffered from the wars of the 17th century. In 1642, the castle was set on fire several times, and in 1674 it was destroyed and uninhabitable. Georg Adam Christoph von Helmstatt (1676–1741) had the free noble manor built around 1700 next to the ruin, on the site of the dilapidated manor house of the former local lords. The manor had once been part of the entire castle complex and was subsequently maintained, while the ruinous core castle was only barely kept up.

From 1911 to 1913, the Tiefburg was renovated by its owner, Raban Graf von Helmstatt (1844–1932), and the residential building was made usable again. It was rented for some time to various Handschuhsheim citizens before a youth hostel was established there in 1921. In 1950, Raban's son Bleickard von Helmstatt (1871–1952) sold the castle to the city of Heidelberg, which handed over the property to the Handschuhsheim district association. The youth hostel operation ended in 1951, and since then the castle has been used for events.