What to See in Bad Honnef - Top Sights and Attractions

Rolandseck Castle in the Rolandswerth district of Remagen was a hilltop castle on the Rhine whose preserved ruins are called Rolandsbogen. In 1040 it was first mentioned as Rulcheseck. The castle was built in 1122 by Archbishop Friedrich I of Cologne together with the Nonnenwerth convent. Possibly a predecessor building existed since 1040.

The ruins of Rolandseck Castle (Burg Rulcheseck) are located below the Rodderberg on a 155.2 m above sea level basalt rock above the Middle Rhine Valley, exactly at its last left Rhine narrows before the gradual expansion into the Lower Rhine Bay, and served together with the almost directly opposite castles Drachenfels and Wolkenburg to secure the southern border of the closed territory of the Archbishopric of Cologne in the 12th century. In the 14th century the old name changed into the present one.

Destroyed in 1475 in the Burgundian War, it was rebuilt and severely damaged by the Swedes in the Thirty Years' War around 1632 and fell into ruin. This collapsed on February 19, 1673 during an earthquake except for one last castle window, the so-called Rolandsbogen.

A Middle High German version of the Roland saga is based on the castle, according to which the knight Roland comes from here and leaves behind a grieving Hildegunde from Drachenfels, who then enters the Nonnenwerth monastery - despite the fact that the Roland figure, as a vassal of Charlemagne, is to be located in the 8th century, a good 300 years before the castle and monastery were built.

The Austrian Cross in Bad Honnef, a town in the Rhein-Sieg district of North Rhine-Westphalia, is the oldest surviving gravesite in the town. It is located on the street Am Wolfshof corner Am Schönblick. The monument is listed as an architectural monument.

After their defeat in the First Coalition War against revolutionary France (1792), 187 Austrian soldiers had died of hospital fever in Honnef in 1793 as a result of their retreat. They were buried on a field at the later Selhoferstraße (today Am Wolfshof) near the later municipal cemetery (today Alter Friedhof). To mark the burial ground a simple stone cross in baroque style with inscription was erected in the same year, which last stood directly at the path in the hedge of a garden. Due to its location, it was exposed to damage by carts. For this reason, between 1892 and 1895, the cross was rebuilt after the efforts of a manufacturer from Düren: after the owner of the garden ceded a few square meters of his land to the municipality, the latter had the cross placed on a substructure of house stone and enclosed it with a wrought-iron grille. Emperor Franz Joseph I paid most of the costs of the new installation and arranged for the Habsburg double-headed eagle to be incorporated into the lattice. On April 21, 1895, a ceremony was held to inaugurate the monument in the presence of a representative of the Austrian government.

A renovation of the monument took place between 1983 and 1985. The entry in the monument list of the city of Bad Honnef took place on October 13, 1993.