Hotel Austria - Museum of Bad Ischl

The museum of the town of Ischl is housed in a building that is truly steeped in history and invites you to take a stroll through the town's history!

Opening times:
Tue - Sun from 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.

After two years of renovation, the museum reopened in July 2024 as part of the European Capital of Culture Salzkammergut 2024.

The museum, located directly on the Esplanade, used to be a well-known hotel. This is where our story begins. We immerse ourselves in the world of the summer resort, the beginnings of the spa, railway nostalgia and embark together on a journey through the historic Salzkammergut and Ischl. We meet illustrious guests at the hotel bar as well as their hosts. But what lies behind the glamour of operetta sounds, soirees and waltzing bliss? You can find out in the exhibition. It is surprising, thought-provoking and raises questions that do not omit sensitive periods of history. It is an innovative concept, a complete reorientation and redesign that spans the centuries right up to the present day.
 
While the narrative previously began with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph, it now extends right up to the present day. The sustainable project is designed as a permanent exhibition and is thus a sustainable project of the European Capital of Culture Salzkammergut 2024 and will be supplemented in 2025/26 by a further level dedicated to the Ischl hotelier, patron and world traveller Hans Sarsteiner.
The reorientation of the exhibition combines scientific content with scenic design and multimedia tools to create a new overall experience, supplemented by mediation concepts for children and young people, both analogue and digital. The aim was to create an atmosphere, to enable visitors to immerse themselves in historical situations and the respective social structures and to understand them. The museum spans over 7000 years, but focusses on the 19th to 21st centuries. Tourism - the summer resort as well as the spa - characterised the region in the 19th century, just as salt deposits and their extraction had done for thousands of years before that.
Before the museum became a hotel, it was a salt manufacturer's house, owned by the Seeauer family, where Archduke Franz-Karl and his wife Archduchess Sophie, the parents of Emperor Franz Joseph I, spent their summer holidays from the 1820s onwards. It is thanks to the Viennese doctor Franz de Paula Wirer, who was travelling through the Salzkammergut in search of a place for spa treatments with brine, that he came across the saltworks doctor Dr Josef Götz. To cut a long story short. Wirer sent the first spa guests in 1822. Among them were the parents of Emperor Franz Joseph, who had not had any children up to that point and who had the desired offspring after the cure. Word spread and year after year more spa guests and summer holidaymakers came.
It is also the place where Emperor Franz Joseph I and Elisabeth Duchess in Bavaria got engaged in 1853. The close relationship between the imperial family and the spa town probably began here. The journey through time in the museum on the first floor takes you back to the boom phase of the imperial era. The spa, the summer retreat and the regular presence of the emperor play an important role here. The theme of summer retreats had and still has a Europe-wide dimension, particularly with regard to the multinational Habsburg state. For decades, Bad Ischl was a temporary imperial town and therefore also a place where decisions were made. The declaration of war on Serbia in 1914 was decided here. Until then, and probably also in the interwar years, Bad Ischl was one of the centres of tourism - away from the capitals and large metropolises.
In exhibitions with a wide range of content, it is only possible to address topics and not to go into all the details. For this reason, the exhibition catalogue "Sehnsucht Salzkammergut" has been published by Verlag Böhlau. It offers over 200 pages of in-depth information.

Hotel Austria - Museum of the City of Bad Ischl
Esplanade 10, 4820 Bad Ischl
Dr.in Herta Neiß
info@stadtmuseum.at
www.stadtmuseum.at