The best-known ruins in Thuringia
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
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Not every ruin here started as a castle. Weimar has the Tempelherrenhaus and the Karlsmühle a kilometer from the center and the Große Grotte 4 km out; the Kunstruine Frankenstein near Bad Salzungen was built as a ruin, as the name admits. The castles are there too: Burg Gleißberg 5 km from Jena, Schloss Osterstein in Gera, the Ebersburg 8 km from Nordhausen. Church ruins include the Husenkirche in Bad Salzungen.
RLQuest knows 64 named ruins in Thuringia, 18 of them with a Wikipedia article; the state's castles (303) and observation towers (54) have separate pages. Ruins tend to sit a little off the path, which is exactly what a daily outdoor quest is for. The app checks the walk from your recorded route, and the stretch between the road and the walls becomes part of your map.
Every dot is a place. The numbers mark the highlights listed below.
Ordered by how much has been written about each place. The numbers match the map.
A selection, best known first, with the nearest larger town next to each.
and 12 more
RLQuest knows these places too. Which means:
Some of your daily quests lead to a real place near you. The app uses your location to check you were really there.
If you're the first person in RLQuest to complete a quest at a place, it's your first find. The Place Book shows you which kinds of place you're still missing.
Every walk uncovers tiles, each about 350 m across. Over time you can see which corners you know well, and where you've never set foot.
Place data © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License. Borders: geoBoundaries (CC BY 4.0); Canada: Statistics Canada. As of 2026-10-02. The list shows the places RLQuest knows and isn't complete. Photos come from Wikimedia Commons; author and license are credited on each photo.
