Chasing the sun, Fri, 10 Sep 2021 | written by Simon
Jemma and Simon at a Castle, City in Austria, Europe

Our road through the Alps led us via Innsbruck and Jemma suggested that we stopped there for a visit. We arrived at 2pm, so had time for only one attraction. We chose the Ambras Castle, and it was a great call!

It’s a Rennaissance castle built by Archduke Ferdinand II on top of a Medieval castle, as a gift for his secret love wife. Ferdinand was a great collector of art, books and various curiosities, and effectively created the first museum worthy of the name. His Wunderkammer is really impressive – paintings on alabaster and marble, coral sculptures, unique musical instruments, costumes, armours, and lots more. He was apparently quite the party animal, too – they even had a honorary book of guests who passed his drinking challenge on display. To be honest, his armours clearly indicated that he did quite enjoy his food and beer, too…

The castle also houses a fantastic Spanish Hall, decorated with lavish frescoes with lots of Italian style grotesques, a lovely courtyard, an impressive bathtub (more like a little pool!), a huge collection of cut, enameled and engraved glassware, and lots and lots of portraits of various Habsburgs. You can really see how their faces get more and more inbred as the years go by. And those painters were paid well to make them look better, I imagine!

Also, lots of friendly peacocks all over the place.

We left at 5pm and spent way too much time trying to find a parking spot in the city. Everywhere is max 90 minutes parking! We need to find some good parkzone map for various cities, surely someone has done somethink like that?

When we finally managed to park back where we started, we walked around town. For the fifth biggest city in Austria, Innsbruck is really tiny – just over 100k people. The centre is nice, but the rest of it is really industrial and quite ugly. In the centre, we walked around the old town and towards the Imperial Palace. All attractions were closed by now, but we walked around to see what we could from the outside.

We wanted to drive out and find a place to park for the night before it gets dark. We didn’t quite manage, because there just were no good spots around the windy mountain roads that are Innsbruck’s suburbs. But we kept driving and eventually found a fantastic spot in the next town, with a view, right over a church. Looking forward to having breakfast here tomorrow!