Schloss Gottesaue

Karlsruhe, Germany, Germany

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Schloss Gottesaue (Gottesaue Palace) is a Renaissance palace located at Gottesauer Straße 32 in the Oststadt district of Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, built around 1584 as a summer residence for Margrave Ernst Friedrich based on a design by Johannes Schoch, Strasbourg's chief architect at the time.

The five-towered building originally featured a chapel on the second floor and a large ballroom on the third, and was constructed on the foundations of an ancient monastery, making it one of Karlsruhe's most recognizable historical landmarks.

The palace has a dramatic history of destruction and reconstruction, surviving the Thirty Years' War largely unscathed but being almost entirely burned to the ground during the Palatinate War of Succession, shabbily repaired, then burned down again in 1735, after which it was reconstructed in a smaller form and used as a fruit market.