Grünsberg Castle is located south-east of Nuremberg. Its origin goes back to the era of the Hohenstaufen dynasty.

The oldest known mentioning can be found in documents dating from 1231. At that time the castle had been given to the Rindsmaul family as an imperial fief. In 1315, it was consigned to the knight Seyfried Schweppermann because his assistance had been crucial for Ludwig der Bayer in winning the battle of Gammelsdorf two years before.

In the year 1504, during the war of the Landshut (aka Bavarian) succession the castle of Grünsberg - as well as the entire surrounding "Nürnberger Land" - came under the free city of Nürnberg. In conjunction with this war, the two upper storeys of the great hall burned down to the base walls. Those storeys had consisted of a timber frame construction. The reconstruction of the great hall had been completed by Endres Oertel only in 1561. This is the reason why the great hall today is appearing as a Renaissance building.

During the next two centuries the ownership of the castle changed among various patrician families of Nuremberg. Eventually, in 1672, it came to the Paumgartner family as a maternal heritage.

In honour of his young second wife Sophie, nee Nützel, Johann Paul III. of the Paumgartner family initiated a great modification towards a Régence style of architecture. Régence is a style in between Baroque and Rococo. Since that time, the castle of Grünsberg appears as a fort from the outside and as a palace inside. Furthermore, for Sophie Johann Paul III. began creating a "Sentimental Park", the main attraction of which is "Sophie's Spring" (Sophienquelle). Johann Paul III. died in 1726, childless and as the last member of the Paumgartner family. Sophie, now being a young widow and heiress of the entire Paumgartner property, had the construction of "Sophie's Spring" completed. In 1754, Eleonore Haller von Hallerstein, the daughter from Sophie's second marriage, married Carl Christoph Stromer von Reichenbach. As a consequence of this, the patrician family Stromer von Reichenbach owned Grünsberg Castle until the year 2000. The inital ownership concept was based on a fideicomis (fee tail). Enforced by law, this concept was turned into private ownership in 1942.

After the death of the last owner, Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Freiherr Stromer von Reichenbach, his heirs accepted turning the entire property into a public nonprofit trust thus fullfilling one of Stromer's main bequests. The legal form of a trust will ensure that the ensemble with its interior and interregional importance will be preserved in its entirety.
Independent of this, the castle is a cultural property in the sense of the Hague Convention entered in force in 1956.