Kasteel Rochendaal, Neoclassical castle in Bevingen, Belgium.
Kasteel Rochendaal is a neoclassical country house built in 1881 in Bevingen, with a white-plastered facade and three storeys. A four-storey turret rises on the left, topped by a partly broken curved parapet. The main facade has three rows of tall arched windows, now boarded or empty, and blue metal scaffolding bands run across it.
Jean Henri Paul Ulens, a lawyer and mayor of Sint-Truiden from 1876 to 1891, commissioned the house in 1881. During World War II the German occupier built the Fliegerdorf on the estate, incorporating the castle; after the Liberation the Americans were stationed there, then a Belgian Air Force training institute until its closure in 1996. A fire destroyed the building on 13 September 2017.
The castle's name refers to the Rochendaal estate at Bevingen, where it stood beside the Fliegerdorf that the German occupier built during the Second World War. After the Liberation the site kept a military role, first with the Americans and then as a training institute of the Belgian Air Force, closed in 1996.
The castle stands at Bevingen-Centrum in Sint-Truiden, on the former Fliegerdorf domain. The building was gutted by the fire of 13 September 2017 and is not open to visitors; the structure is fenced off and unsafe to enter. The surrounding grounds, including the fishing ponds, are to be redeveloped under the 2012 plan for 300 homes in a 16-hectare park.
The 2012 redevelopment plan for the former castle grounds foresaw 300 homes in a 16-hectare park with fish ponds, and the castle itself was to be restored. The fire of 13 September 2017 ended that prospect; the building has stood ruined since, its windows boarded and its left tower parapet broken.
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