Kašperk

This majestic border fortress, which today serves as a cultural monument open to the public, was built in 1356 by King Charles the Fourth. However, the castle remained in royal hands only until 1365, when the sovereign pawned it to Jan Očka of Vlašim. Thereafter, various pledge holders – such as Petr Zmrzlík of Svojšín with his son, the Lords of Švamberk, or Zdeněk Konopišťský of Šternberk – took turns here until the seat was abandoned at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The subsequent lease to the town of Kašperské Hory at the end of the sixteenth century led, due to neglected maintenance, to the dilapidation of the structure, which was completed after the Thirty Years' War by the dismantling of its masonry for building material. The architectural core of the ruin is a spacious palace flanked on its shorter sides by two prismatic residential towers, to whose curtain wall a burgrave's house was added in the late Gothic period, along with the adjoining lower castle to the west, with its only surviving building at the western end. Of the outer late Gothic fortifications, which according to Tomáš Durdík were of little effect against firearms, only fragments have survived to the present day, and above all its finest part – the forward bastion of Pustý hrádek.