7. The Fairy Castle King
King Ludwig II also developed a mania for extravagant building projects in the Bavarian mountains. He started with the Linderhof Palace, patterned on the Trianon palace and built between 1869 to 1878. Simultaneously, he started the construction of his most famous project, Neuschwanstein, a fairy tale castle precariously situated on a crag and decorated with scenes from Wagner’s operas. Built from 1869 to 1886, it inspired Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty Castle. As that one was being built, Ludwig started an even more ambitious project in 1878, the Herrenchiemsee Palace, a copy of Versailles.
The Herrenchiemsee was never completed because Ludwig went bankrupt. Between the abandonment of his official duties, profligate spending, and withdrawal into the life of a recluse among other odd behavior, the king’s ministers finally had enough, and in 1886 he was declared insane by a panel of doctors and sent to a remote palace by a psychiatrist. Three days later, he drowned himself in a lake, and took his psychiatrist with him. Today, Ludwig’s architectural and artistic legacy includes many of Bavaria’s biggest tourist attractions.