Is Schloss Linderhof worth visiting? An honest answer

The honest shape of it

Twenty-five minutes, eleven rooms, no photographs. That is the visit inside this building, stated as plainly as I can put it, and if you read nothing else on this page read that line. It works out at about two minutes a room, walking, with nothing to take away afterwards but what you actually looked at.

None of that is a criticism of the tour, which is well run and leaves every five to ten minutes; it is the size of the building. Linderhof is the only one of Ludwig’s three palaces he lived to see finished, and it was finished in 1878 partly because it is small enough to finish. People arriving from Neuschwanstein at lunchtime, which is what most day trips do, have just spent a morning on something at a different scale.

Reviewers split on the interior almost exactly along that line, and both halves are right about what they saw. It is a small building carrying decoration sized for a much larger one. Some people find that extraordinary and some find it airless. I would not try to talk you into either.

Is it worth going inside?

Different question, and a better one. My answer: yes if you are already there, because about eleven euros for the only way into the building is not a decision worth agonising over, and no if going inside is the point of the trip. The tour is the shortest part of the day here. Budget the day around the park and treat the interior as one item on it, and the visit works; do it the other way round and you will feel short-changed by four in the afternoon.

If you are buying in the summer half-year, buy the combination ticket that covers the palace and the grotto. The grotto is the thing here that is nowhere else, and it is a fifteen-minute tour that people remember longer than the twenty-five-minute one.

The thing that most often ruins this trip

Not the palace. The booking. And two listings in this catalogue say, in their own exclusions, that you do not go in at all: “Admission to Linderhof Palace *usually only an exterior visit”. One of the two names Linderhof in its own title — the other is a Neuschwanstein day whose itinerary never reaches this valley. That is the most useful sentence in the whole catalogue and it is printed on the card of both. A reader who books the one with Linderhof in the title, expecting to go in, has bought a photograph stop — and the title does not tell them so.

The listing most people book is the Munich day trip that takes in Neuschwanstein first and Linderhof after it. Read its inclusion list to the end before you assume you are getting in: the castle entry tickets sit there as “Neuschwanstein and Linderhof Castle entry tickets (if option selected)”, which is the listing’s own wording and not the same thing as included. What each listing does about admission works through all of them.

And one listing in this catalogue says “Skip-the-line tickets” and names no building at all, on a trip that visits two palaces. Neither “included” nor “not included” is a true reading of that, and it is worth a message to the operator before you pay rather than an assumption afterwards.

None of that is anybody misleading anybody. It is what happens when a listing is written for the journey and read for the destination. The cure is reading the inclusion and exclusion lists to the end, and the tickets page does that for all twenty-three of them.

What the trip actually costs you

Two numbers and one sentence about the gap. The palace charges about eleven euros at its own window. The cheapest listing on the platform that will put you in front of the building is about seventy-six. The difference between them is the drive, not better access — there is no faster entry to buy, no skip-the-line to a tour that leaves every five minutes, and of the 127 activities this site read across ten Bavarian hubs, none is a ticket to Linderhof. What is on sale is the day out, and for a lot of people the day out is the right purchase.

If you can reach Oberammergau, the bus and the door ticket are the cheap way and there is nothing clever about the alternative. Getting there has it.

• Anyone whose only free day is in the winter half-year and whose reason for coming is the grotto. Move the trip. Here is what winter closes.
• Anyone travelling with people who will not enjoy a park, because the park is the visit.
• Anyone choosing between this and Neuschwanstein on a single day and wanting the bigger building. The comparison is honest about that.
• Anyone who has booked a listing whose exclusions say “usually only an exterior visit” and has not noticed yet.

Read next

• How long you actually need.
• The Venus Grotto — the case for the trip.
• Linderhof or Neuschwanstein.
• What reviewers actually wrote.

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