Gloggnitz Castle

Schloss Gloggnitz stands in the town of Gloggnitz in southern Lower Austria. It began as a Benedictine monastery founded in 1094 by monks from Vornbach Abbey. After the monastery was dissolved in 1803, the complex became a private residence and later passed to the town in 1930. The main building is a three-storey Baroque structure with a northern side that still shows its medieval fortress character. The site was revitalised between 1977 and 1992 with support from federal ministries, the provincial government and private donors. In 1992 it hosted the Lower Austrian regional exhibition and afterwards became Austria’s first ‘wedding castle’. Today it offers rooms for concerts, exhibitions and festivals, including an annual park festival and a disco. A café-restaurant run since 2003 provides weekend meals and event catering. Visitors enter through two late-Gothic gatehouses into a polygonal courtyard where the Baroque church of Our Lady of the Snows and St Oswald stands. The church preserves a 12th-century chapel and a 36-metre tower added in 1693. Inside, altars, statues and an 1800 organ by Ignaz Kober remain. Nearby, the early-Gothic St Michael’s Chapel still shows traces of its medieval charnel house and a damaged fresco of St Christopher.