What to see at Moritzburg Castle

The dining room, which I would see first

Seventy-one antler trophies, most of them between 270 and 400 years old, and among them the heaviest red deer antler in the world: 19.8 kilograms, nearly two metres across. It is a room about killing animals and it is also, unarguably, a spectacular object. I think it is the better of the castle’s two famous rooms and I know I am in a minority about that, because the feather room is the one on the postcards.

The Federzimmer

A bed and a set of wall hangings carrying roughly a million peacock, pheasant, guinea fowl and duck feathers, worked into canvas. Augustus the Strong bought it in 1723 for his Japanese palace; it came to Moritzburg in 1830, and it has been back on show since 2003 after a restoration that ran nineteen years. Nineteen years is the fact that makes people stand still. The room in full.

The tablet that comes with it

The baroque ticket includes a HistoPad, and it is included rather than sold, which is unusual enough to say out loud. It does not come with the winter ticket, because the winter exhibition is a different show.

Outside, which is half the visit

The castle stands on an artificial island: Augustus the Strong had four smaller ponds flooded into one to put it there, and the approach across the water is the view everyone photographs. In the park stands the Fasanenschlösschen, the Little Pheasant Castle of 1770 to 1776, with a miniature harbour and a painted brick lighthouse 21.8 metres high beside it. The park and the lake.

And in winter, a different building behind the same door

The baroque exhibition runs 20 March to 1 November. The castle then shuts completely from 2 to 19 November. From 20 November to 28 February the building holds the Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel exhibition — Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella — at the same admission price, and while that is on, the baroque rooms are not part of the visit. Neither exhibition is a reduced version of the other. They are two shows that take turns in the same rooms. The winter one, and how I would choose.

The castle sells its own admission at its own counter and on schloss-moritzburg.de. There is no Moritzburg entry ticket on GetYourGuide, so nothing on this site is a substitute for that counter. What the platform sells is the journey, and two of the six listings that reach Moritzburg carry a castle ticket inside the day: the guided day from Dresden and the private Prague car that pairs Moritzburg with the Zwinger.

The guided day that gets you inside

Eight hours out of Dresden with a live guide in English, French, German or Italian, Meißen and the porcelain museum in the morning and Moritzburg after, with the castle admission named in the inclusions and the day’s public transport covered. Per group of up to ten, around four hundred and twenty euros, 4.6 from 3 reviews. Wesley, from the United States, wrote that his guide, Herr Vögel, was excellent in every way. The full review.

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