Jadgschloss Moritzburg > Reviews > Moritzburg

Author's product rating:   

Advantages:	Beautiful
Disadvantages:	Not central

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

I spent last year in Germany and was in Leipzig very close to Dresden. My German friends, who were also residents of Dresden, would frequently mention Moritzburg as the perfect place to end any visit to Dresden. After many visits to Dresen this wisdom suddenly returned to me when I was taking a visiting parties ofd relatives to Dresden for the fourth or fifth time.

We had exhausted most of the usual tourist haunts of Dresden and this particularly adventurous and tireless aunt and uncle were hungry for more. So we jumped on the train from Dresden Hauptbahnhof and headed off on the fifteen minute ride to Moritzburg. The return fair from Dresden to Moritzburg was about five Euros. (I subsequently found out that you can also get there by bus from the Marktplatz for about four Euros return, but it takes about half an hour.)

When we got there I could immediately see what my German friends had meant. Moritzburg was one of the most picturesque places I visited in Germany, and relatively unknown! Moritzburg is a Baroque building which was constructed in the 18th Century under the orders of the famous, and omnipresent in my reviews of Dresden, Augustus the Strong. What resulted is a fantastic Baroque building that has four cylindrical corner towers, which give it the appearance of a fairy tale castle.

Due to it's position outside Dresden, Moritzburg survived the bombing of 1945 unscathed and has been loving returned to it's 18th Century appearance after it's use as a Russian Army headquarters. It features a large collection of period furnishings and hunting trophies. It also houses rotating exhibitions, the one which I saw was about Dresden's reconstruction after the War, and was very informative. Entrance to the castle itself was four Euros per person ,this also includes entrance to the grounds. Moritzburg is open from 10-6 daily.

The gardens are lovely to walk through and contain many well positioned benches to sit and relax in the shade. The grounds also contain a chapel with splendid ornaments, a museum housing a zoological exhibit, and a museum to Kathe-Kollwitz, who was vehemently anti-Nazi and spent the last years of her life here after 1945.

I would highly recommend Moritzburg, although built as a hunting lodge it puts many so-called palaces and stately homes to shame. The gardens alone are a wonderful change from the reconstruction work going on in inner city Dresden.