Schloss Schwetzingen

I planned a little outing to visit the Schwetzingen Palace with a group of BASF partners today. We had gorgeous weather for it and spent an hour or so wandering around the gardens and inside the palace.

The palace was a summer residence for some of Germany's prince-elects, Karl Philip and Charles Theodore. It was built in the early 1700's from an old hunting lodge and expanded on over the years. There is a main building with two buildings arcing out from its sides, one of which was used just for reception rooms to host the large gatherings required of the court at the time.

Here is a view of the palace from the front. I wasn't able to get a picture of the large arcing buildings out to the sides, you'll just have to believe me that they're there.



The inside of two of the reception rooms. They're beautiful. Definitely a great place for a wedding or concert. Maybe I'll get here for a concert at some point.



Some views of the main building from the back.



Here are some pictures from the gardens. They're enormous - they make the buildings seem inconsequential. It would take all day to explore everything the gardens have to offer; we only explored a small corner of them. I love all the huge hedge arches in them - shown in the first picture below.



There was a long "hallway" of vines leading to a dark cave with a picture on its wall. Supposedly you could sit here and pretend to be looking somewhere far away, out over a river. Neat idea but I'd rather look at the real thing than this picture.



Looking back out towards the sunlight:



There is a bath house on the grounds, where Charles Theodore apparently spent most of his time. It still had its original floors and furniture. We got to wear fun slippers when we were in it.



This is the ceiling in the main room, it symbolizes light chasing away the dark:



The bath was really impressive - it could easily fit 10 people. My picture below doesn't do it justice but we weren't allowed to take pictures of it so I had to sneak this in. You basically walked down some stairs into the "bath" which got filled with water from snake heads. And they filled it twice - once to warm the stones and a second time for bathing. Sounds like such a waste of water. There was also a nice spotlight above the bath area, for atmosphere and romance I suppose.



The first picture is the ceiling in the room with the bath (complete with mirrors, of course), the second is looking down into the bath itself.



I don't remember the story behind these tiles, but they're Dutch. There is a little building just filled with them in the middle of the gardens. They were rescued from another building and put here for safe keeping.