Drachenfels (Siebengebirge) - Tourism

Tourism

The rock and the ruins gained popularity in the romantic era, after the Napoleonic Wars had ended. The visit of Lord Byron to Mehlem and its appearance in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage provided the rock with international attention and it became a highlight of the so-called Rhine romanticism. Poems were composed by people like Edward Bulwer-Lytton and locally by Heinrich Heine. Thus popularized, it quickly became a tourist attraction, which it still is.

A neogothic castle, lower on the mountain, is named Schloss Drachenburg and was built in 1882 by Baron Stephan von Sarter. Both the top and Schloss Drachenburg can be reached by the Drachenfelsbahn, a rack railway built in the 19th century to satify demand from growing tourism. The Drachenfels is sometimes irreverently called Schwiegermutterfelsen (mother-in-law rock) or jokingly referred to as "the highest mountain in Holland" because of its popularity among Dutch tourists.

The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine.
Whose breast of waters broadly swells
Between the banks which bear the vine,
And hills all rich with blossomed trees,
And fields which promise corn and wine,
And scattered cities crowning these,
Whose far white walls along them shine,
Have strewed a scene, which I should see
With double joy wert thou with me!

— Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage

In the 70's a new restaurant (with view) was built on top of the mountain in the then popular brutalistic style. In January 2011 work began to demolish it, renovate the buildings from the 30's and replace the restaurant with a glass cube. The project is expected to be finished in the summer of 2012.