Oberdiessbach Castle

It was built a few meters south of the Old Castle, built in 1546, between 1666 and 1668 as a country estate in the style of the late French Renaissance for Albrecht von Wattenwyl (1617-1671), a colonel in French service under King Louis XIV, and is still owned by the von Wattenwyl family. The central wing has a high hip roof, long chimneys and loggias. Rudolf von Tavel describes the sight of the castle with its proud arched windows, the beautiful grilles and the chimneys, which grew out of the mighty roof like small towers, in his Bernese German novel Der Frondeur.

In front of the main facade lies a baroque garden with a wrought-iron gate in the Régence style, to which avenues with a total length of 1 km lead. The interior of the castle from the construction period was supplemented with tapestries in the late 18th century.

Oberdiessbach Castle is the first purely French-influenced country estate in the Canton of Bern and is considered the most important work of Bernese secular architecture in the mid-17th century.