Feldkirch Sickhouse

The Siechenhaus stands in Feldkirch’s Levis district, a pair of 16th- or 17th-century buildings beside the Reichsstraße road to Dornbirn. The site once lay far beyond the medieval town walls where a leper house was founded in the 1300s. A fire in 1557 damaged the nearby Magdalenenkirche and may have destroyed the original infirmary. Rebuilt soon after, the complex gained its present timber-framed façade, a rare Vorarlberg example of this style. The building’s history includes use as an emergency school after the town’s high school burned in 1697. For centuries it sheltered the poor, supported by meadows and fields that were later sold in 1847. In the 20th century the main house became a refuge for impoverished families before reopening in 1985 as a youth hostel. Visitors find the main building now runs a hostel while the smaller outhouse shelters a bus stop. An underpass beneath the Reichsstraße leads to a modern glass-and-concrete bus terminal on the far side. Next to the complex stands the 14th-century Magdalenenkirche, its walls still showing signs of the 1557 fire.