Goethe spoke of a "quite magnificent region" when he visited Weißenburg more than 200 years ago. Like him, many people from near and far have since visited the Saale landscape below Rudolstadt.

We have only known for certain about the castle since the 14th century. It appears to have been built shortly after the division of the Ascanian Counts of Orlamünde (1248), when one of the two lines of the dynasty had Weißenburg Castle built as a new representative residence near the old ancestral castle of Orlamünde. The place name Weißen probably derives from the Weißbach stream, which flows into the Saale close to the village, so that the Weißenburg castle was probably also named after this stream, which comes from the densely wooded Uhlstädter Heide.