Schloss Trautenfels

Schloss Trautenfels stands on a cliff above the Enns river in the Styrian municipality of Pürgg-Trautenfels. The palace rises 673 metres above sea level at the foot of the Grimming massif. Its first recorded building dates from 1260 to 1262, when it served as a customs post on the old salt road through the Ennstal Valley. The medieval Neuhaus was later owned by Ferdinand Hoffman, whose 1563 wedding brought Renaissance frescoes by a northern Italian artist. In 1664 Count Siegmund Friedrich von Trauttmansdorff bought the castle and transformed it into a Baroque palace between 1670 and 1672, giving it the name Trautenfels. The palace is now home to the Regional Landscape Museum of the Universalmuseum Joanneum. The museum displays around one thousand exhibits tracing the natural and cultural history of the Ennstal Valley and the Ausseerland region. Visitors can also see the Antler Room of the Counts of Lamberg, the Marble Hall and the lavishly decorated State Rooms. A free-standing Baroque chapel and five bastions add to the architectural interest of the site. The building’s interior decoration includes frescoes by Carpoforo Tencalla painted between 1670 and 1673. A few metres west of the palace lie the ruins of the Protestant church of Neuhaus. This church was once the principal religious centre of the upper Ennstal Valley during the Reformation. After the Counter-Reformation it was abandoned and later excavated in 1991. Today the remains serve as a memorial to that period. The ridge on which the palace and church stand offers views down the Enns Valley towards the Grimming massif.