Friedhofskapelle

The neugotische Friedhofskapelle stands in Badbruck, a village north of Bad Gastein in Salzburg. It sits on the valley floor, about 130 metres east of the Gasteiner Ache and 300 metres above where the Kötschach stream joins it. The chapel belongs to the Catholic parish church of Bad Gastein and is protected as a listed building. It replaced an earlier cemetery around the Nikolauskirche that had become too small and suffered costly damage from its steep slope. Work began in 1891, giving the valley its first properly planned burial ground. The building itself is a two-bay rectangular church with a pitched roof and pointed-arch windows filled with neugotisches tracery. A small sacristy and a porch with buttresses flank the nave, while a slender spire rises above the west gable. The cemetery spreads north and south of the chapel, its rows of graves bordered by grass paths. Among those buried here are well-known figures from the town’s history. The chapel’s interior is simple, its whitewashed walls lit by the coloured light from the stained glass. Outside, the quiet air is broken only by the sound of the nearby stream and the occasional bell from the spire.