Bad Gastein

Bad Gastein is a spa town that looks like a small city clinging to a cliff. It sits at about 1,000 m in the Gastein Valley of the Hohe Tauern, and its centre was built around a waterfall: the Gasteiner Ache drops about 340 m in three steps straight through the middle of town, spanned by a stone bridge of 1840. Because the slopes are so steep, the hoteliers of the 19th century stacked their grand houses many storeys high along the rock, which earned the place the nickname of the "skyscraper village".

The town's fortune comes from 17 thermal springs that rise at the foot of the Graukogel beside the falls, at 40 to 46 °C, producing about five million litres a day. The springs were known by the 13th century, when the poet Neidhart von Reuental mentioned them; Paracelsus studied them, and in the 18th century Archbishop Hieronymus von Colloredo built the Badeschloss beside the falls for his own cures. In the 19th century Bad Gastein became one of the most fashionable resorts in Europe: Emperor Wilhelm I came almost every summer between 1863 and 1887, Empress Elisabeth, Bismarck, Schubert and Schopenhauer took the waters, and in 1865 Austria and Prussia signed the Convention of Gastein here, dividing Schleswig and Holstein between them.

That golden age is still written into the town's architecture. The Hotel Straubinger by the waterfall, the Badeschloss opposite it and the late-historicist Grand Hotel de l'Europe of 1906–09 give the centre its Belle Époque profile; after decades of decline, the Straubinger and the Badeschloss were restored and welcomed guests again in 2023, and the Gastein Museum now occupies part of the Hotel de l'Europe. A more unusual cure lies deep inside the mountain at Böckstein: the Gasteiner Heilstollen, an old gold-mining gallery where patients ride a small train deep into the mountain to breathe radon-rich air. In the Thermal Spring Park, hot water can be seen welling naturally out of the rock, and the Felsentherme, which won an Austrian architecture award in 1968, offers thermal pools.

Getting there

Bad Gastein station is on the Tauern Railway, which runs from Schwarzach im Pongau through the Tauern Tunnel to Carinthia; InterCity and long-distance trains stop here. The nearest larger town, Saalfelden am Steinernen Meer, is about 41 km away, and Salzburg Airport (SZG) about 76 km.