Tirol Castle

The hill above the Adige valley near Merano was already settled in antiquity, and archaeologists excavating in 1993 uncovered the remains of three churches built one on top of the other, the earliest dating to the late Roman period and the latest, with three apses, to between the 8th and 11th centuries. A first castle was built here before 1100, and a keep was added in a second building phase of 1139/40. Count Meinhard II of Gorizia-Tyrol carried out a third phase of construction in the second half of the 13th century. The castle was the ancestral seat of the Counts of Tyrol, whose title in turn gave the whole region its name. In 1347 Meinhard's granddaughter, Countess Margaret of Tyrol, was besieged in the castle by forces of the Luxembourg king Charles IV. Margaret, the last of her line, is recorded as having resided at the castle for years.

The castle remained the seat of Tyrol's sovereigns until 1420, when the Habsburg archduke Frederick IV moved the administrative seat north across the Brenner Pass to Innsbruck.

Decline followed. A palace Meinhard II had built on the castle's east side was lost entirely as the stream running through the adjoining Köstengraben gorge eroded the rock beneath it, and at one point the castle itself was sold to be used as a quarry. It is unclear whether work on the keep was interrupted by the building of the neighbouring refectory or whether the keep was damaged in the fire of 1302, but by 1532 a document already describes it as a ruin, as does the oldest surviving depiction of the castle, made in 1620. The castle was restored in the 19th century, and the keep was rebuilt between 1902 and 1904 using stone recovered from a nearby medieval farmstead that had burned down in 1900.

Two Romanesque portals, at the palace and at the chapel, carry marble reliefs of legendary creatures, religious themes and geometric ornament; historians disagree on their origin, some tracing them at least in part to the three-apse church whose remains were found nearby, others attributing them to Count Albert III of Tyrol. The chapel's frescoes are also of note, and the chapel houses the oldest known painting of Tyrol's coat of arms, the Red Eagle. The chapel was heightened in the 19th century, its lower level dedicated to St Pancras and its upper level, reserved for the nobility, to St Elizabeth of Hungary.

The castle has housed a museum since the early 1980s, and since 2003 has been home to the South Tyrolean Museum of History, open to the public from mid-March to early December. It is listed as a cultural heritage monument in South Tyrol and as Italian national heritage. A falconry with a nursing ward for birds of prey operates next to the castle; founded in 1989 in the Aurina Valley, it moved to its present site in 1998 and runs independently of the museum.