Hospitalturm
Rathausstraße 3, 55430 Oberwesel
As the name suggests, there was and still is a hospital (Holy Spirit Hospital) near the tower. Today, a little further north on the city wall is the Mother Rosa Chapel. This is the choir of the former Holy Spirit Church (compare KuLaDig object Mother Rosa Chapel). The Hospitalturm is a gate tower, which formed the Rhine-side exit of the Hospitalgasse and was supposed to protect the wide Hospitaltor. This gateway or the Hospitalgasse was particularly important at that time, since it led from the Rhine to the city wall on the mountain side and thus provided the shortest route. During the fortification of the core city, the towers were mostly built later in the course of the raising of the city wall around 1240. In the course of this, the Hospitalturm was also placed on the city wall, so that the side walls of the tower have no fixed connection to the city wall. Moreover, the Hospitaltower did not have a deep foundation on the inner side of the wall, where it reaches the ground. This unfavorable statics, as well as the weight that the tower exerted on the city wall, caused the foundation of the city wall to give way. This is ultimately the reason why the tower was already leaning towards the Rhine during the construction phase. The builders hoped that they could give the Rhine-side shell towers a little more stability by bracing the tower walls with wooden wall anchors made of oak beams on all four side walls. Today, the beams have rotted away, but the holes left behind attest to this construction. In addition, the hospitaltower was rebuilt from the battlement floor onwards, so that the tilting of the entire tower could be avoided. The shell tower, open to the city, reaches a height of over 17 meters over 4 floors. Obviously, the hospice tower was originally smaller. An indication for this assumption is the old lower battlement. The hospice tower is 8 meters wide and 4.5 meters deep. A beam above the hospitaltower can be dendrochronologically dated to 1391. In this and the following years, according to tradition, the gates and doors of the entire city wall were rebuilt and extended. In 1978, the restoration of the Hospitalgassenturm was begun. (Kira Bublies, University of Koblenz-Landau, 2016)