I’ve just been out to Bavaria to check out the hotel – Schloss Elmau – where the G7 is having its big annual Summit over the 7-8^th June 2015. And a truly lovely place it is, too, with all imaginable top-end luxuries in a spectacularly pastoral setting in a valley of its own, surrounded by mountains.

The likes of Barack and Angela should feel well looked after in the very short time that they have here, because the hotel has a staggering array of restaurants – seven – and spas – four – for its 162 rooms. I’ve done a detailed report on the place which will appear in due course in the travel section of the Financial Times.

There is already a huge security presence sweeping the valley. We were stopped in our car by a man with a gun in his waistband, who didn’t want to know anything about us, but just kept us stationary for a couple of minutes whilst something else was going on, somewhere else.

Black saloons came and went from the front of the hotel, and CIA operatives have been attending the hotel’s morning yoga classes. A rumoured 17,000 police have apparently been assigned to the task of keeping everything safe, which is more than were on duty for the London Olympics. The locals are, of course, grumbling about the costs, plus the potential closures to their roads and railways.

What the G7 leaders won’t have time to do is explore the surrounding area, which is a shame. Some two hours hiking directly up the hill from Elmau is Schachen, the extraordinary mountain lodge built by ‘Mad’ King Ludwig II, with its pseudo Turkish interiors. One of Ludwig’s even more extraordinary palaces, Linderhof, is a hop and a skip away.

Elmau is in a deeply traditional and very Catholic neck of the woods, with the huge baroque monastery of Ettal and the quiet town of Oberammergau – scene of a huge Passion Play every ten years – within a half-hour’s drive.

The resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen lies 18km to the west, with the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, towering over it. The Zugspitze has a cog-wheel train and cable car to the top plus a glacier which the Germans cover with plastic in the summer to stop it melting. All very organised.

We were lucky enough to have an Alpenhorn lesson with Elizabeth Heilmann up on the Zugspitze’s peak, which certainly attracted the crowds.  Regrettably, however, this is not something the G7 will have a chance to do, although they’ll no doubt be making lots of noise of their own.

Otherwise, they’ll just whizz in, and whizz out again, 24 hours later. Maybe they’ll see enough of the region to make them want to come back again some other time.

Summer brings the promise of holidays, and many of Germany’s tourism hotspots are gearing up for the seasonal crowds. But one of the biggest attractions – Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria – has been preparing for summer 2013 for longer than most.

On and off since 2009, the fairytale form of Neuschwanstein has been cloaked in scaffolding for exterior repairs. However, just in time for summer 2013, the castle is shedding its skin. Thanks to the completion of an extensive renovation programme, the 6,000 tourists who visit during each day in August will have the chance to take an unobscured photo of King Ludwig’s ‘fantasy in stone’.

Neuschwanstein Castle was built in the 1870s, and was never designed to accommodate vast crowds – hence the importance of the present-day works. Indeed, the castle was intended to be a private refuge for introverted King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Neuschwanstein’s whimsical turrets were devised by theatre-set designers – a mock-Medieval fortress for a day-dreamer of a monarch.

‘Mad’ King Ludwig was one of the last of the Wittelsbach dynasty to rule Bavaria, and a truly private soul. Haunted by problems in his personal and political life, the eccentric King channelled his energies, and his dynasty’s fortunes, into flamboyant pet-projects which included Neuschwanstein.

Nowadays, the 1.2 million annual visitors who tramp up to the castle cause problems that King Ludwig could never have imaged. One major headache was subsidence due to the vibrations of motor vehicles and tourists’ footsteps, which necessitated laying steel-supports deep into the bedrock.

However, the recent scaffolding has been used to address an altogether more cosmetic issue. Neuschwanstein was originally coated in an attractive limestone, chosen by King Ludwig for aesthetic affect. Despite its photogenic quality, there was one big problem with the limestone: it eroded badly in the winter snow. As a result, it has been a three-and-a-bit year project to re-clad and resurface the exterior and return it to its former glory.

The best news for tourists is that the exterior of the castle looks as perfect as King Ludwig could ever have dreamed. The bad news, though, is for the Bavarian Palace Authority – the maintenance tasks are never-ending, and their next project will be re-enforcing some of the internal walls. There’s a lot of work in preserving a fairytale.

Edd Morris is author of Neuschwanstein Castle: An Exploring Castles Travel Guide.

Eccentric, big-spending King Ludwig II of Bavaria, or ‘Mad King Ludwig’ as the schoolbooks would have him, was regarded as a liability in his lifetime, but in the 125 years since his death, his legacy of castle-building, particularly at Neuschwanstein, Linderhof, and Herrenchiemsee, has brought millions of visitors to southern Germany.

Ludwig was a tall, good looking 18-year-old when he acceded to the throne of independent Bavaria in 1864. He disliked the tittle-tattle of politics, and struggled to reconcile his intense Catholic faith with his increasing attraction to men. His solution was to withdraw from society and immerse himself in the world of books, poetry and music, particularly Wagnerian opera, with Wagner himself a personal friend.

Meanwhile his views on the monarchy – which was soon to come to an end in Germany – were a throwback to a long-gone more glorious era. In particular, he idolised Louis XIV, the French Sun King, and had his fantasy palace of Herrenchiemsee built on an island in Lake Chiemsee (south-east of Munich) in an attempt to emulate the Palace of Versailles.

Essentially a fabulous piece of scenery perched atop a rock

The medieval town of Füssen, south-west of Munich, is the location for his most celebrated creation, Neuschwanstein, the prototype that Walt Disney used for Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. This is the Ludwig masterpiece that has launched a billion postcards and is essentially a fabulous piece of scenery perched atop a rock emerging from forest. Its salvo of turrets, peaks, gabled windows and tumbling walls looks out over distant lakes and meadows, and is the very epitome of a medieval knight’s castle, despite being little more than a century old. Inside, its ‘medieval knight’ installed electricity and flushing loos for his medieval business.

There’s little conventional in Neuschwanstein’s fixture and fittings. No portraits or family heirlooms adorn the walls. Instead, Ludwig had it decorated with frescos of scenes from Wagner, and the giant Singer’s Hall was designed for opera to be performed, usually for an audience of one. In fact only 16 of the 110 interior rooms of Neuschwanstein were completed when he died. His main base, when he wasn’t in Munich on official business, was his other Upper Bavarian Schloss, Linderhof, little more than 15 km away as the crow flies.

Linderhof is a pocket palace, much more about interiors. Inside, it is the most complete of all his works, a jewel box of a building which is so extravagantly slathered in golf leaf and painted porcelain that visitors are not sure whether to laugh or cry. The most astounding room is the bedroom, again a tribute to Louis XV, who used to hold official audiences in his bedchamber. Ludwig’s is a giant tapestried bed in a riot of Meissen porcelain with a view out to a series of waterfalls, but he was not one to receive visitors while recumbent. Even his dining room has a table only big enough for one, ingeniously contrived so that it could rise up through the floor, fully laden, so that no servants needed appear. Ludwig didn’t want any of the Sun King’s type of court flannery around him; he was far happier with animals, and he would sometimes invite his favourite horse to dinner.

Inevitably, the king came to a mysterious end. He was arrested early one morning at Neuschwanstein by a state delegation led by a psychiatrist, who pronounced him mentally ill. He was taken away and placed under house arrest on the shores of Lake Starnberg. The very next morning he was found drowned in the lake’s shallows, the psychiatrist with him. It was suggested at the time that he’d strangled the latter and then committed suicide, but like the rest of his life, it all sounds pretty far-fetched.

Ludwig’s palaces are state-owned, as are dozens of others.

If you want to visit the castles and need accommodation, check the reviews on www.holidaycheck.com