Schwetzingen is unique in that the entire inventory of buildings and sculptures from the second half of the eighteenth-century has been preserved.
It includes unique properties such as the earliest surviving balcony theatre, the last eighteenth-century garden mosque still in existence, and the exquisite bathhouse compound. With the circular parterre and the meadow vale, outstanding artistic creations of the Baroque and the landscape garden eras have been preserved. The world of the eighteenth-century comes to life in the technical monuments of the two waterworks and the relics of everyday life preserved in the palace gardens.
Besides this uncommon concentration of original elements the visitor to Schwetzingen will experience the ongoing efforts to preserve and continue to preserve the garden in its historic dimension by expert maintenance, and in this way to provide insights into the gardening of the eighteenth-century. The foundations were laid by the patron himself, who declared his palace and garden a “Palatinate monument” and initiated preservation strategies that anticipate modern approaches towards monument protection, and who had, even earlier than that, set another precedent for German monument protection in his systematic cataloguing and study of smaller monuments.