Schloss Elsenheim

Schloss Elsenheim stands in Salzburg’s right-hand Altstadt, near the corner of Pausingerstraße and Arenbergstraße, close to the Äußerer Stein and Inneres Parsch districts. Built in 1449 by Hans Elsenheimer, a city judge and later mayor, the small castle still bears his family’s name. Over the centuries it passed through several noble hands: the Rietz family in 1662, the Rehlingen barons in 1681, and in 1862 it became the property of Princess Sophie Arenberg. A modest 18th-century remodelling by the Rehlingen family gave the building its present façades. The building’s artistic legacy includes the former studio of painter Franz Xaver von Pausinger on the fourth floor. Later, Franz Jung-Ilsenenheim worked there and produced dioramas now displayed in Salzburg’s Haus der Natur. In the 1980s Friedrich M. Welz and Oskar Kokoschka planned an “Austrian Academy of Arts” here, though the project never took shape. The castle’s architecture features a flat hipped roof, two small turrets, a northern stair-tower and a southern tower raised on round-arched pillars. Today the castle remains in private ownership and is not open to the public. A broad park surrounds the building, and a double-run conglomerate staircase leads from the southern turret down to the garden parterre. The structure’s late-18th-century façades and its compact, turreted silhouette give it a quiet presence in the city’s historic fabric.