Owing to its advantageous location for both scenery and transport on the edge of the Frankfurt Rhine Main Region, Königstein is a favourite residential town.

Königstein borders – from northwest to east – on the communities of Glashütten, Schmitten, Oberursel, and Kronberg (all four in the Hochtaunuskreis), and from southeast to southwest on Schwalbach, Bad Soden and Kelkheim (all three in the Main-Taunus-Kreis).

The local legend states that King Chlodwig (466-511), founded the town after building a castle on a hill as well as a chapel.

[3] Königstein had its first documentary mention in 1215, making it likelier that the castle was built around the 12th century for the town's – and the Frankfurt-Cologne commercial road's – security.

(Local legend has it that gunpowder was hidden in the castle's well, and a spark from a careless French soldier's pipe started the explosion).

The city became famous as "Jewish spa" mainly due to the high proportions of Jewish guests (for example Otto Klemperer, Kurt Hahn, Carl Sternheim, Botho Graef, Reinhold Lepsius), who stayed in the internationally famous sanitarium Dr. Kohnstamm (the name stuck even after the death of the founder Oskar Kohnstamm in 1917) and Hotel Cahn, which offered kosher food.

Königstein was also the residence of prominent Jewish citizens (for example Mathilde Hannah von Rothschild, Sigmund Kohn-Speyer, L. Albert Hahn, Hermann Wronker, Albert Katzenellenbogen, Julius Blau, Max Neisser, Adolf Sabor, Selmar Spier, the family of Richard Musgrave), who in turn brought their friends and guests there.

Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin's wife, was a famous visitor of Königstein after World War II.

Represented on town council are the CDU, the SPD, the FDP and the Greens, as well as the ALK (Aktionsgemeinschaft Lebenswertes Königstein), a citizens' coalition.

The citizens' above-average buying power is a boon to local retail businesses, the range of which is correspondingly great.

Through the takeover of the well known German personnel consultancy Hofmann Herbold & Partner, Königstein was for years headquarters to the biggest international executive search firm Korn/Ferry.

Since 2005 also a series of concerts called Mittelalter rockt die Burg ("Middle Ages rock the castle").

As a new open-air highlight, from 2006, the Burgfestspiele Königstein ("Königstein Castle Festival Games") will be held, bringing to the stage a multi-faceted cultural programme in the unique atmosphere of the ruins: ambitious concerts and operatic and musical productions with large casts under the open sky.

The biggest in the whole town is TSG Falkenstein, offering volleyball, judo, gymnastics, athletics, Gardetanz (a kind of dancing popular in Germany involving dancers in old, often 18th-century, military uniforms), and football, and having more than 800 members.

FC Königstein and TSG Falkenstein), whose first team has been plying for many years in the top of the Regional Upper League (Gruppenliga).

Nearby there is a viewpoint called Dettweiler-Tempel, named after physician Peter Dettweiler, specialised in pulmonology, who helped establishing Falkenstein as a spa town.

Built in 1891 by Frankfurt Banker Albert Andreae de Neufville, it was transformed into a boarding school (Schülerheim) in the post-war years (1957–1987).

Former Grand Duke of Luxembourg Adolph von Nassau's stately home is known as the Luxemburgisches Schloss and houses now the court (Amtsgericht Königstein).

[8] At the foot of the Burgberg ("Castle Mountain"), surrounded by a park through which flows the Woogbach and adjoining which is the Woogbach Valley is found Saint Angela's Ursuline Convent (Ursulinenkloster St. Angela), founded in 1884, and owning a like-named state-recognized private school.

Its exclusive residential areas (also in Falkenstein) are mainly marked by Art Nouveau and its Heimatstil-influenced offshoots as well as 1960s Chic (bungalows).

Bishop Maximilian Kaller – who was the first bishop with special authority over ethnic Germans who had been driven out of lost German territories at the end of the Second World War – appointed philosophy professor Erich Kleineidam to the new institution in late May 1947 as a professor.

For three years, from 1970 until his death in 1973, the writer and journalist Herbert Kranz (born 4 October 1891 in Nordhausen; died 30 August 1973 in Braunschweig) lived here.

The two spas of Königstein and Falkenstein have recently formed the entrance portal to Germany's first climatic healing park (Heilklimapark).