The belle-époque façades above the gorge

Bad Gastein grew from a mountain bath into an imperial resort in the nineteenth century, and because there was no flat ground it grew upwards: the great houses are terraced into the rock on both sides of the gorge, each one looking over the roof of the one below. Kaiser Wilhelm I came for the cure twenty times; Empress Elisabeth, Schubert and half the Habsburg court followed.

Three buildings carry the picture. The Hotel Straubinger on the Straubingerplatz gave the town its shape and its name; the Hotel Badeschloss stands right beside the waterfall, a former public bath house that stood empty for years, lost its roof to an arson fire in 2013 and reopened in December 2023; and the Grand Hotel de l'Europe, a late-historicist pile built in 1906–09 to plans by the cathedral architect Matthäus Schlager, still looms above the Straubingerplatz as a former hotel.

The classic view is from the Wasserfallbrücke and from the road that switchbacks below it, where four or five storeys of ornamented façade stack behind each other. Stucco reads best in flat light — bright overcast, or the shaded hours — and after dark the lit windows against the black gorge make the strongest single frame in the town.

Restoration has been going on around the Straubingerplatz for years and the site changes: scaffolding, hoardings and closed sections move from building to building. Check what is open and what is wrapped before planning a session around one particular façade, and remember that the interiors are private property.