Church

Loretto Chapel

A Baroque pilgrimage chapel of 1657 on the Lorettoberg hill - modeled on the Santa Casa di Loreto.

The Loretto Chapel stands on the Lorettoberg hill at about 348 m above sea level and consists of three chapels joined under staggered roofs: the central Marian chapel with a barrel vault, the Joseph chapel added to the west with a groin vault, and the eastern Anne chapel, which serves as a sacristy. Its model was the Santa Casa di Loreto in Italy. After the Battle of Freiburg in 1644, the townspeople vowed to build it during the Thirty Years' War; the main donors were the master guildsman Christoph Mang and his son Franz Xaver. The main chapel was completed in October 1657, and the Anne chapel added in 1660. Christoph-Mang-Straße in the Wiehre still recalls the donor. In 1785 the city authorities banned the Sunday and feast-day pilgrimage in order to strengthen attendance at the parish churches. Inside, frescoes by Johann Caspar Brenzinger (1651-1737) survive, restored in 1902; in 2008 the ensemble, together with the neighboring Schloss-Café, was granted heritage status.

Ecclesiastically the chapel today belongs to the Wiehre-Günterstal pastoral unit with the parish of St. Johann (Kirchstraße 6). From the Heinrich-von-Stephan-Straße tram stop, a footpath leads up through the southern Wiehre and the Lorettoberg trail; on foot from Wiehre station it is about 25 to 30 minutes uphill. From the forecourt the view opens over the Old Town and the edge of the Black Forest. One anecdote holds that in 1744 Louis XV watched the siege of Freiburg from here and narrowly escaped a cannonball. Please check current opening times and service dates with the pastoral unit before visiting.