15 Beautiful Castles You Can Actually Spend the Night In

Most of us found our first castle before we could read. It appeared in a bedtime story, with a tower for the princess, a moat for the dragon, and a hall where the feast never ended, and it stayed with us long after we learned that real castles were cold, damp, and built for war.

The remarkable thing is how many of the real ones have quietly become the story. Ashford Castle, in Ireland, first fortified in 1228, keeps a falconry school in its woods. Thornbury, in Gloucestershire, still has the same spiral staircase Henry VIII climbed to bed. Czocha, in Poland, hides a maze of secret passages and runs a wizarding school in its halls.

Fifteen beautiful castles across Europe and America now take paying guests, and in each one, the fairy tale and the history are the same building. This guide is for sleeping inside them.

Ireland

Ashford Castle, County Mayo

The de Burgos constructed the first walls in 1228 where Lough Corrib meets the wild country of Connemara. The Guinness family bought the estate in 1852 and spent a fortune making it grand. Oscar Wilde spent his boyhood summers here, in the house his father built by the lake. Ashford has welcomed guests since 1939 across 350 acres, and its woods hold Ireland’s oldest falconry school, where a Harris hawk drops from the trees onto your glove. The village of Cong, a short walk away, was the set for The Quiet Man.

– Best time to visit: May to September for the lake and the hawk walks; September is quieter, and the woods turn.

– Website: https://ashfordcastle.com/

Castle Leslie, County Monaghan

The Leslies have held Glaslough since 1665, when a bishop who had defied Cromwell used his reward from Charles II to acquire a lake and a castle. Jonathan Swift stayed here in the 1720s and left a verse mocking the library’s rows of books, many written by the Leslies about themselves. The library is still there, still filled with books by the Leslies, and the family is still writing. Castle Leslie is one of the few houses on this list run by its founding family, with a cast of relatives that includes Winston Churchill’s aunt, and the castle bedrooms have no televisions, which, after a night by the fire, begins to feel like the point.

– Best time to visit: October to March, when the fires are lit, and the library earns its keep.

– Website: https://www.castleslie.com/

Dromoland Castle, County Clare

The O’Briens trace their line to Brian Boru, the High King killed at Clontarf in 1014, and Dromoland was their seat for centuries. The blue-limestone castle where guests sleep dates back to the 1820s. By 1948, the 16th Baron Inchiquin was short enough of money to take in paying visitors, and in 1962 the family sold it to an American industrialist who turned it into the hotel it is today. The present Lord Inchiquin lives next door to Dromoland, so a thousand years of lineage can watch the guests arrive.

– Best time to visit: Late spring for the walled garden, or September for the Burren and the Cliffs of Moher without the summer coaches.

– Website: https://www.dromoland.ie/

Scotland

Dalhousie Castle, near Edinburgh

Edward I slept here in 1298 on his way to fight William Wallace at Falkirk. Henry IV besieged it for six months in 1400 and gave up. Cromwell used it as a base for his invasion. The Ramsays owned Dalhousie from the 13th century until 1977, longer than any other family has held a castle in Scotland, and the ninth Earl founded a university in Nova Scotia that still carries the name. It has been a hotel since 1972 and sits eight miles from Edinburgh, with a restaurant in the vaulted dungeon and a bar in the library, and it wears eight centuries of siege as easily as some houses wear wallpaper.

– Best time to visit: August, if you want Edinburgh’s festivals by day and a castle to retreat to at night; otherwise late autumn for the dungeon dining.

– Website: https://www.dalhousiecastle.co.uk/

Inverlochy Castle, Fort William

Inverlochy is a Victorian baronial house beneath Ben Nevis and named for the ruined 13th-century fortress two miles away. Queen Victoria spent a week here in 1873, sketchbook in hand, and wrote in her journal that she never saw a lovelier or more romantic spot. Inverlochy has accepted guests since 1969. It has seventeen bedrooms, a restaurant led by Michel Roux Jr., a private loch to row across before breakfast, and the Jacobite Steam Railway, the one Harry Potter rides in the films, leaving from the town below. The Queen’s verdict has held for a century and a half, and the mountain has done nothing to contradict it.

– Best time to visit: May to June or September, when the light is long, and the midges are not yet, or no longer, in charge.

– Website: https://www.inverlochycastlehotel.com/

Glenapp Castle, Ayrshire

David Bryce designed Glenapp in 1870, with turrets and warm sandstone overlooking the Firth of Clyde, with the great rock of Ailsa Craig rising from the sea beyond it. In 1917 it passed to the shipping magnate Lord Inchcape, whose daughter Elsie Mackay, an actress and pioneering pilot, set off to cross the Atlantic in 1928 and was never seen again. The village below is Ballantrae, which Robert Louis Stevenson passed through in 1876 and later borrowed its name for the title of his novel about feuding brothers. Serving as a hotel since 2000, the castle has seventeen rooms and a coastline that changes its mind hourly, like a Stevenson plot.

– Best time to visit: Late spring to early autumn for the gardens and the sea views; check the winter opening dates before booking.

– Website: https://glenappcastle.com/

England

Thornbury Castle, Gloucestershire

Edward Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, began building Thornbury in 1511 as a palace to rival the king’s, and it is now among the many cozy stays in the UK that offer the chance to sleep in a castle. The king had him beheaded in 1521 and kept the house. In 1535, Henry VIII arrived with Anne Boleyn for a visit that lasted ten days because plague had broken out in Bristol; she was executed the following May. The ornate brick chimneys of 1514 predate Hampton Court’s, and it is the only Tudor castle in England where guests can stay. The original spiral staircase reaches the Henry VIII suite, and the mounting block in the yard, carved with the Stafford knot, is the one the king would have used to climb onto his horse.

– Best time to visit: Year-round; summer for the Tudor gardens, deep winter for a four-poster and a fire in a room built for a king.

– Website: https://www.thornburycastle.co.uk/ 

Hever Castle, Kent

Anne Boleyn grew up inside these double moats, and Hever keeps two of her Books of Hours, prayer books she signed in her own hand, one with the line “remember me when you do pray.” When the American millionaire William Waldorf Astor bought the castle in 1903, he added a Tudor-style wing for guests and a library of 2,500 leather-bound volumes; the house records show that the room was given to a visiting Arthur Conan Doyle. The 28 bedrooms are in the Astor and Anne Boleyn wings, and the stay includes access to the castle and gardens. After the day visitors leave, the grounds belong to the guests, and for an hour at dusk the castle is a home again.

– Best time to visit: April to May for the tulips and the Italian Garden, or October for the color with fewer day visitors.

– Website: https://www.hevercastle.co.uk/stay/bed-breakfast/ 

France

Hôtel de la Cité, Carcassonne

Carcassonne is Europe’s great medieval walled city, restored in the mid-19th century by the architect Viollet-le-Duc, whose fairy-tale conical roofs still annoy purists and enchant everyone else. The Hôtel de la Cité was built in 1909 on the site of the bishop’s palace, between the counts’ castle and the basilica, with its oldest rooms in a 12th-century tower. Churchill and Grace Kelly signed the visitors’ book; there is a Library Bar, Kate Mosse set her novel Labyrinth in these streets, and the book village of Montolieu is twenty minutes away. At night, when the coaches have gone, the ramparts are quiet enough for the fiction to seem reasonable.

– Best time to visit: May, June or September; July and August bring the heat and the biggest crowds inside the walls.

– Website: https://mgallery.accor.com/en/hotels/8613.html 

Château de Mercuès, Lot

For seven centuries, the counts and bishops of Cahors spent their summers in this 13th-century fortress on a rock above the river Lot. Since 1983, it has belonged to the Vigouroux family, a family of winemakers who dug a monumental barrel cellar beneath the gardens and replanted the slopes with Malbec, the grape behind the old “black wine” of Cahors. Mercuès has 30 rooms, a chapel tucked into a tower, and a restaurant that treats truffles seriously. Bishops came here to escape the city; the most impressive room now lies underground, among the barrels.

– Best time to visit: Late September to October for the harvest in the vines below; the hotel is seasonal, so check the spring reopening date.

– Website: https://chateaudemercues.com/ 

Iberia

Parador de Alarcón, Castilla-La Mancha

Three rings of wall, a Moorish citadel from the 8th century, and the Júcar gorge on nearly every side. Alfonso VIII took it in 1184 after a nine-month siege that ended only when a knight scaled the wall on two daggers wedged into the stone and opened the gate from inside. In the 1300s, it belonged to Don Juan Manuel, nephew of a king, who wrote El Conde Lucanor within these walls, a book of moral tales that predates Chaucer. Spain rescued the castle in the 1960s and opened it in 1966 as a state-run parador with fourteen rooms, the best of them in the keep. There is very little to do in Alarcón beyond the walls, the river, and the book, and the quiet is the kind the book was written for.

– Best time to visit: April to May or October; the Castilian plateau is fierce in high summer and bitter in January.

– Website: https://paradores.es/en/parador-de-alarcon 

Pousada Castelo de Óbidos, Portugal

In 1282, King Dinis gave this castle and its walled town to his bride, Isabel, and Óbidos remained part of the queen’s dowry for centuries. In 1951, it became the first Portuguese monument converted into a pousada, a state hotel, with rooms named for the kings and queens who stayed there and three suites in the towers. Below the walls, the town has reinvented itself around books, with a bookshop in a 12th-century church and a UNESCO City of Literature title since 2015. The FOLIO festival runs from October 8 to 18, 2026 with the Nobel laureate Jon Fosse on its opening weekend. Guests sleep in the castle and wake up in a book town.

– Best time to visit: October, for FOLIO; otherwise spring, before the summer day-trippers from Lisbon fill the lanes.

– Website: https://www.pousadas.pt/en/hotel/pousada-obidos 

Central Europe

Czocha Castle, Lower Silesia, Poland

Founded in the 1240s to guard the Bohemian border, Czocha owes much of its strangeness to a Dresden cigar magnate, Ernst Gütschow, who bought it in 1909 and had it rebuilt with a maze of secret passages, at least one behind the library shelves. After the war, the Polish Army took it over and had it removed from maps. It has been a hotel since 1996, and since 2014 it has hosted a live-action wizarding school that fills the halls with robed students. The hidden doors and the dungeon are real, and the staff will show polite guests more of them.

– Best time to visit: Late spring to early autumn for the lake and forest; check the events calendar first, as the wizarding school takes over the whole castle on its dates.

– Website: https://zamekczocha.com/en/ 

Schlosshotel Kronberg, Germany

Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, the widowed Empress Friedrich, built this house near Frankfurt between 1889 and 1893 as a memorial to her husband, and had “Friderici Memoriae” carved over the door. She filled the library with every book that mentioned him and hung Titian and Gainsborough on the walls. In 1901, as she was dying, she had her private letters smuggled to England; published in 1928, they remain the sharpest account of the German court ever written. Kronberg has taken guests since 1954 and still belongs to her descendants. Her library is still there, and so, in the rooms’ atmosphere, is her grief.

– Best time to visit: May to June, when the park is in flower, or December, when the house does Christmas the way an empress would have expected.

– Website: https://schlosshotel-kronberg.com/en/hotel/geschichte 

The Americas

Oheka Castle, Long Island

The financier Otto Kahn had a hill built before building the house, so that his 127-room French château, finished in 1919, would sit on the highest point of Long Island. It remains the second-largest private residence in the United States. Orson Welles filmed the exteriors of Xanadu here for Citizen Kane, and the Gold Coast around it is the world Fitzgerald transformed into West Egg. By 1984, it stood abandoned and had been repeatedly set alight by vandals; Gary Melius bought the ruin for $1.5 million and spent $40 million restoring it as a 32-room hotel.

– Best time to visit: Midweek in late spring or early autumn; weekends belong to the weddings, and the gardens are at their best on either side of summer.

– Website: https://www.oheka.com/ 

Why the Stories Matter

What a castle adds to a bed, a fire, and a view is time. The stair at Thornbury is the one Henry climbed; the prayer book at Hever carries a queen’s handwriting; the library at Castle Leslie is the one Swift laughed at, and the people who own it are still adding to the shelves. Sleeping in a castle is the closest most of us will come to living inside a story we were told as children, and in these fifteen, the story was true.