Qualla: Sønderborg Castle

Sønderborg Castle: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arne List, CC BY-SA 3.0. Christian II had ruled Denmark, Norway and Sweden. In 1532 he was lured into an ambush, brought to Sønderborg, and kept as a prisoner of state for seventeen years. Danish tradition puts him in the Blue Tower and leaves him there, a dethroned king rotting in the dark. The reality was less gothic and rather stranger. He was housed in a bright, spacious room; surviving estate accounts show he was supplied throughout with food, drink and clothing; he seems to have moved fairly freely inside the outer walls, and on occasion he rode out with the local nobility to hunt. A king can be perfectly well fed and still never be going home.

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Image: Arne List | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sønderborg Castle: A Tower Against the Wends

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hubertus, CC BY-SA 3.0. The castle began around 1158 as a fortified tower raised by Valdemar the Great on an islet in the Als Sound, part of a chain of defences against Wendish raiding from the southern Baltic. The islet was later joined to the island of Als, and the place took its name from its positio...

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Image: Hubertus | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sønderborg Castle: Dorothea's Chapel

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Malene Thyssen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between 1549 and 1557, Christian III had the fortress rebuilt as a four-winged Renaissance castle by the architect Hercules von Oberberg, keeping King Hans's west wing and adding three more. After the king's death in 1559, von Oberberg built something rarer for his widow. Queen M...

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Image: Malene Thyssen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Sønderborg Castle: A Duchy the Size of a Doorstep

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Erik Christensen, CC BY 3.0. After Dorothea died in 1571 the castle went to her son, Hans the Younger, and became the seat of a miniature state: the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg. It did not outlast him. On his death in 1622 the duchy was partitioned, and by 1667 the ruined line was absorbed back in...

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Image: Erik Christensen | CC BY 3.0

Sønderborg Castle: The Great Hall

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The Riddersal runs thirty-four metres, long enough that a ducal court could hold a ball in it without anyone feeling crowded. It was where guests were received, where the music played, where a small dynasty performed being a dynasty. It has not entirely retired. In 1998 it hosted...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Sønderborg Castle: The Museum of a Border

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. When the barracks emptied at the end of the First World War, the last duke of Augustenborg let the Sønderborg County Museum move into part of the building, and since 1921 the castle has housed the Sønderborg Castle Museum — the principal museum of the former Duchy of Schleswig. I...

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Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen - (WT-en) Elgaard at English Wikivoyage | CC BY-SA 4.0