Baudenkmal, Medieval castle in Gefrees, Germany

Burg Stein, of which only the Kemenate and chapel survive, is a three-storey 14th-century building with a high half-hipped roof added in the 17th century. The chapel of St. Michael, installed in 1686, occupies the upper floors. Remnants of defensive walls, the Zwinger, the outer bailey and a gate arch dated 1548 remain on the wooded spur above the Ölschnitz.

Burg Stein arose around 1000 as an early castle of the Walpoten and was transferred to the Bishopric of Bamberg in 1028. After falling into ruin, it was rebuilt from 1342 by Heinrich, Friedrich and Heilmann von Hirschberg, creating the hall building that defines the site. In 1488 Margrave Friedrich I of Brandenburg redeemed it as a margravial administrative castle, and after the Thirty Years' War the buildings decayed; the administrative household was dissolved in 1684.

The name Stein comes from the rocky spur above the Ölschnitz loop where the Walpoten built their seat around 1000. The chapel of St. Michael, installed in 1686 in the upper floors of the Kemenate, is still the room visitors enter. A local legend, the Geiger von Stein, tells of an underground passage from the ruin to Bad Berneck and a piper who had to face a corpse procession in its vaults.

The ruin stands on a wooded spur above a bend of the Ölschnitz, reached on foot from the Stein hamlet about 100 m back from the castle grounds. The core of the site, with its wall remains, is still fairly legible; the terrain is rocky and the slope steep. The address is Stein 32 in the Gefrees district of Stein.

The cartographer Johann Christoph Stierlein sketched the ruin in detail in 1795, recording long defensive walls and outbuildings that no longer exist. A local legend, "Der Geiger von Stein", tells of an underground passage from the castle to the ruin at Bad Berneck, where a violinist faced a corpse procession in the vaults.