Schloss Katzenberg

Schloss Katzenberg stands on a raised terrace beside the old Roman road from Altheim to Passau, in the parish of Kirchdorf am Inn. The building began as a medieval fortress with twin defensive ditches and high walls, later converted into a residential palace. Its inner courtyard is lined with arcades and open galleries, while the great hall and chapel show fine 17th-century stucco by Giovanni Pietro Camuzzi. The castle’s history is recorded in documents from 1196, when it belonged to the bishops of Passau. Over the centuries it passed through the hands of the Ortenburg counts, the Mautner family of Burghausen, and the Taufkirchen counts, who transformed it into a Baroque residence. A fire in 1629 and peasant uprisings in 1705 left their marks, yet the main structure survived. In the 19th century it became the property of the Steinbrener family, who ran an attached brewery. Inside the ground floor a bookbinding museum displays richly bound Bibles and prayer books from the former J. Steinbrener publishing house. The chapel holds an altarpiece of Saint Sebastian painted by Paul Erlmiller in 1731. Outside, part of the old defensive ditch survives as a landscaped garden, while the nearby villages of Obernberg and Reichersberg lie within a few kilometres.