Goldener Adler

The Hotel Goldener Adler stands in Innsbruck’s old town, a fourteenth-century hostelry that has welcomed travellers for six centuries. Its timbered façade and vaulted cellars still show the weight of time, though modern comforts were added in 1990 for the 600th anniversary. The building occupies the same site where merchants once rested between Italy and Germany, their wagons rattling over the cobbles outside. The inn’s guest book reads like a roll-call of European history. Emperor Maximilian I knew the house, and in 1552 Emperor Charles V paused here while fleeing through Tirol. In 1573 Erzherzog Ferdinand II hosted a festival for 416 guests and 580 horses, netting the landlord 1800 gulden. Goethe twice broke his journey, once recognising the landlord’s son as the model for a character in his own work. Andreas Hofer stood on the first-floor balcony in 1809 to promise the people he would not abandon them. Inside, the Kaiser-Joseph-Stube keeps the emperor’s portrait above the door, while the Goethestube later became a meeting place for local writers and artists. A marble guest ledger in the covered courtyard lists further names from science and the arts. Outside, the narrow lanes of the Altstadt lead to the Inn Gate, the same arch through which Joseph II entered in 1777 on his return from Paris.