Historically, it guarded an important connection between Mühlhausen and the Halle-Kassel trade route in the Wipper valley, whose current incarnation is the Bundesautobahn 38.

[citation needed] The site of castle Lohra had presumably already been fortified in Germanic times, being named after a possible nearby sanctuary to the goddess Lare.

The complex was extended by the counts of Lare in the 11th and 12th centuries who constructed the largest castle in the southwestern foothills of the Harz mountains.

Today, it is held by a non-profit organisation which rents the residential quarters to tourist groups and oversees the conservation and restoration of the castle.

The convent harboured Benedictine and Augustine nuns until it was dissolved and secularized in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation in 1546.