History & Ownership · Peleș Castle
From Carol I's mountain hunting ground to Romania's most visited museum — and a royal family that's still fighting for it back.
Karl Eitel Friedrich of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen arrived in Romania in 1866 as a young Prussian prince, invited by the Romanian political elite to take the throne as Prince Carol I. He was 27 years old, spoke no Romanian, and had never seen the country he was about to rule.
Within years of his arrival, he began exploring the Carpathian Mountains around the Prahova Valley — initially for hunting. In 1872, during a trip through the valley at 800 metres altitude, he found the forested slope where the Peleș River ran cold and clear out of the mountains. He purchased the land and commissioned architectural drawings the following year.
The first phase of construction began in 1873 under Czech architect Wilhelm Doderer, who produced a relatively modest Neo-Renaissance hunting lodge design. Work proceeded slowly — the site was remote, materials had to be transported up mountain roads, and Carol's ambitions kept expanding. The first phase was habitable by 1883 but far from complete.
The second phase brought in Johannes Schultz, who worked on the castle from the 1880s through 1914, dramatically expanding the footprint, adding the towers that define the silhouette, and furnishing the interior to the specification that visitors see today. Schultz drew on Neo-Renaissance, Neo-Gothic, and Moorish sources simultaneously — producing the eclectic result that shouldn't work architecturally but does.
By the time of Carol I's death in 1914, the castle had 160 rooms, 34 bathrooms, central heating, electricity, a telephone exchange, and a private lift — among the first private lifts installed in Romania. The construction cost was staggering relative to the Romanian state's revenues of the period.
Carol I died in October 1914, just as the First World War was beginning. His nephew, King Ferdinand I, inherited the castle along with the throne. Ferdinand and his British-born wife, Queen Marie (granddaughter of both Queen Victoria and Tsar Alexander II), used Peleș as a summer residence. Marie was the more colorful figure: she redecorated several rooms in her own style, wrote extensively about Romanian history and culture, and during the First World War personally negotiated the terms of Romania's entry on the Allied side.
After Ferdinand's death in 1927, the castle passed through a period of political turbulence. King Carol II — Ferdinand's son, who had twice been forced to renounce his rights to the throne before eventually taking it — used Peleș as his primary residence during his reign from 1930 to 1940. He brought his mistress, Magda Lupescu, to live at the castle, which caused considerable scandal.
King Michael I, who came to the throne first as a child and then again as a young man after Carol II's abdication, was the last king to use Peleș. He was forced to abdicate by the communist government in December 1947 and left Romania in January 1948.
In 1948, the new People's Republic of Romania nationalized the castle and its contents. For several decades it served as a state guest house and protocol facility — foreign leaders including Charles de Gaulle visited. Nicolae Ceaușescu reportedly disliked the castle's royal associations intensely and at various points considered converting it to other uses.
The castle was opened to the public as a museum in 1953, closed again for extended periods, and eventually re-established as a public institution after 1989.
Peleș Castle is owned by the Romanian state and administered as the National Museum Peleș Complex. The question of whether it should be there is genuinely contested.
King Michael I — who died in December 2017 at age 96 — spent the final decades of his life arguing, through Romanian courts and through diplomatic channels, that the nationalization of 1948 was unlawful and that the castle and its contents should be returned to the royal family. His eldest daughter, Princess Margareta, has continued this legal effort.
The Romanian government returned some other royal properties to the family over the years, but Peleș has remained state property. The political difficulty is significant: Peleș is Romania's most visited museum. Returning it would either require buying the family out at an enormous price or accepting that a private family would own the country's most prominent tourist site.
As of 2026, the case remains unresolved. The castle continues to operate as a state museum. Visitors standing in the Hall of Honor are, technically, in a building whose ownership status has been disputed in Romanian courts for over 30 years.