5 Days in Innsbruck

Start by the river at the Markthalle, the covered market where Innsbruck does its shopping: farmers' cheese from the Zillertal, Tyrolean Speck, the juniper-cured, smoked ham of the region, mountain bread, honey and schnapps. Grab a coffee and a pastry from one of the stands, or a Speckbrot, a slice of dark bread with Speck, and sit at the counters.

Farmers sell inside the hall every morning but Sunday, and on Fridays and Saturdays there's a proper farmers' breakfast at the back of the hall until noon. It's a good place to come back to on your last day for food to take home.

Walk up Herzog-Friedrich-Strasse, the old town's main street, under its Gothic arcades, to the Golden Roof, the symbol of the city. Around 1500, Maximilian I had a balcony added to the old ducal residence, with a roof of 2,657 fire-gilded copper tiles, so he and his second wife, Bianca Maria Sforza, could watch tournaments and festivals in the square below. The reliefs show him with both his wives and a pair of morris dancers.

The small museum behind it is about Maximilian, and worth it only if you have the Innsbruck Card. Opposite, the Helblinghaus is a Gothic house covered in Rococo stucco, like a wedding cake. Then climb the 133 steps of the City Tower, built around 1450 as a watchtower, for the best view of the old town's roofs with the Nordkette above them.

A minute north of the Golden Roof, the Cathedral of St. James (Dom zu St. Jakob) is a high baroque church from the 1720s, with a ceiling painted by Cosmas Damian Asam that seems to open into the sky. Over the high altar, in a frame of gold and silver, hangs its treasure: Mariahilf, a small, tender painting of the Virgin and Child by Lucas Cranach the Elder, one of the most copied images in the Alps. You'll see versions of it painted on houses and in village churches all over Tyrol.

Next door, the Hofburg, the imperial palace, was built by the Tyrolean dukes, rebuilt for Maximilian and then remade in rococo style by Maria Theresa in the 1750s and 60s. Behind it, the Hofgarten, the old court garden, is the city's favorite park. Inside, the Giant Hall is the highlight, with its ceiling frescoes and portraits of Maria Theresa's 16 children, and there are rooms furnished for Franz Joseph and Sisi, who passed through rather than lived here.

Maria Theresa's own story with Innsbruck is a sad one. Her husband, Franz Stephan, died suddenly here in 1765, during the celebrations of their son's wedding, and she turned his room into a chapel and wore black for the rest of her life.

Across the road, the Hofkirche holds the most ambitious tomb in Europe. Maximilian planned it for himself: a huge black marble cenotaph guarded by 40 larger-than-life bronze statues of his ancestors and heroes, and his grandson Ferdinand I built the church to hold it in the 1550s. Only 28 of the statues were ever made, the Schwarze Mander, "black men", although several are women, and the King Arthur was designed by Albrecht Dürer. The punchline is that Maximilian isn't here. He died in 1519 and was buried in Wiener Neustadt, and the tomb has always been empty.

Andreas Hofer, the leader of the 1809 uprising, is buried in the same church, and up the stairs, the Silver Chapel holds the tomb of Archduke Ferdinand II and his wife Philippine Welser, whose love story you'll pick up again at Ambras on day five. A combined ticket covers the Tyrolean Folk Art Museum next door, the best of its kind in the Alps: carved nativity scenes, carnival masks and a series of complete wood-paneled farmhouse living rooms, Gothic to baroque, that you can walk into.

Back in the old town, the little Strudel-Café Kröll on Hofgasse does one thing very well. Its strudels are baked fresh all day, sweet and savory, from classic apple with cinnamon and raisins to apricot, poppy seed or spinach and cheese. Order a slice of Apfelstrudel with whipped cream or vanilla sauce, and a coffee, and sit by the window.

If you'd rather have cake, Café Munding on Kiebachgasse, open since 1803, is one of the oldest confectioners in Tyrol and roasts its own coffee.

Walk down to the Inn bridge, the crossing that gave the city its name, for the view everyone comes for: the row of tall, colorful houses on the far bank in Mariahilf and St. Nikolaus, painted yellow, pink, green and blue, with the Nordkette rising straight behind them. It's best in the last light, when the rock turns pink.

Cross over and walk downriver along the bank through St. Nikolaus, the old fishermen's and craftsmen's quarter, for a drink in one of its old inns, and back over the next bridge to the old town, lit up for the evening.

The trip starts at Congress station, next to the Hofburg, where the funicular leaves from under a flowing white glass roof designed, like the three stations above it, by Zaha Hadid in 2007. They look like frozen sheets of ice, or wet snow, and they're the reason architecture students come here from all over the world.

The train crosses the Inn on a bridge, then climbs through a tunnel and up the mountainside to the Hungerburg, a plateau 860 m up with a view over the city, in about eight minutes. From there, the Nordkette cable car takes over.

The first cable car rises to the Seegrube, at 1,905 m, and the second to the Hafelekar, at 2,256 m, on the ridge of the Nordkette, the mountain wall that closes the city to the north. From the top station, a steep path climbs in about 15 minutes to the summit of the Hafelekarspitze, 2,334 m up. On one side, the whole Inn valley and the city spread out below you, with the Stubai glaciers beyond. On the other, the empty, rocky valleys of the Karwendel run off north towards Germany.

In summer, the Goethe Path runs along the ridge to the Pfeishütte, a two-hour walk for experienced hikers. The Innsbrucker Klettersteig, a via ferrata along the ridge, starts here too, for climbers with a guide. Even if you only go to the summit, wear proper shoes and bring a layer, since it's often 15 degrees colder than in town.

On the way down, get off at the Seegrube for lunch on the terrace of the restaurant at the top station, with the city 1,300 m below your table. Order the classics of Tyrolean mountain food: a bowl of clear broth with Kaspressknödel, flattened, pan-fried dumplings of bread and strong cheese, or Speckknödel, bacon dumplings, and Kaiserschmarrn to finish.

In winter, this is a ski area with the Karrinne, a 70 percent off-piste gully that's one of the steepest ski routes in Austria, and on the first Friday of the month the cable car runs late for a fondue evening above the city lights.

Ride back to the Hungerburg and take the funicular one stop down to the Alpine Zoo, at about 750 m the highest zoo in Europe. It keeps only animals of the Alps, about 150 species: ibex, chamois, marmots, brown bears, wolves, lynxes, bearded vultures and golden eagles, in enclosures built into the steep wooded hillside. It's small, well done and a good way to see the animals you won't spot on the mountain.

From the zoo, you can walk back down to the city in about 20 minutes, over the Inn bridge into the old town.

Innsbruck has more than 35,000 students, and their nights out start in the Bögen, the arches under the railway viaduct running northeast from the station, where every arch holds a different bar or club, from cocktails to rock. In two of them, the Bierfabrik has brewed its own beer since 2023. It's busiest on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

For something calmer, the old town has wine bars under Gothic vaults, and the Treibhaus, a cultural center with a bar, a garden and jazz and world music concerts, has been the alternative heart of the city since 1981.

The Bergisel ski jump was rebuilt in 2002 to a design by Zaha Hadid, her first building in Austria: a slim concrete tower topped by a curving head that holds the start of the jump, a café and a viewing platform. A funicular and a lift take you up, and from the top you look down the inrun, which seems almost vertical, to the stadium where the Olympics of 1964 and 1976 were held, with a cemetery right behind it. Locals joke that jumpers land among the graves.

Every January, Bergisel hosts the third leg of the Four Hills Tournament, the biggest event in ski jumping, and in 2027, for the first time, women jump here too, on 2 January, with the men on 3 January.

On the same hill, the Tirol Panorama was built to house the Riesenrundgemälde, a circular painting 1,000 m² in size from 1896, which surrounds you with the third battle of Bergisel, on 13 August 1809. That summer, Tyrolean farmers led by Andreas Hofer, an innkeeper from the South Tyrol, beat the Bavarian and French armies here three times. For a few months, Hofer ruled Tyrol from the Hofburg. Then Napoleon won the war elsewhere, the Tyroleans lost a fourth battle here on 1 November 1809, the uprising collapsed, and Hofer was betrayed, captured and shot in Mantua in 1810.

The painting was a sort of cinema in its time, and it still works. Downstairs, the Kaiserjäger Museum covers the Tyrolean regiments, and outside stands Hofer's statue, looking down at the city.

Walk down the hill to Wilten, or take the longer way through the Sill gorge, a wooded path along the river below Bergisel, to where two great churches face each other across the road. The yellow and white Wilten Basilica, from the 1750s, is one of the most beautiful rococo churches in the Alps, all pink and white stucco and gold, built on a place of pilgrimage to the Virgin much older than the town.

Opposite, Wilten Abbey has been home to Premonstratensian canons since 1138. The story goes that it was founded by Haymon, a giant who killed another giant, Thyrsus, and built the monastery in penance. His wooden statue, over 4 m tall, guards the door of the abbey church.

On Leopoldstrasse, the Grassmayr family has cast church bells since 1599, for 14 generations, and the foundry still works, making bells for churches from Tyrol to Asia. The small museum explains how a bell is made, and in the sound room you can strike bells of different sizes and feel the note in your chest. If you're lucky, you'll see the casting yard through the windows.

Walk up Leopoldstrasse to the Triumphal Arch, which Maria Theresa put up in 1765 for the wedding of her son Leopold. Then Franz Stephan died during the celebrations, so the arch has two faces: the south side celebrates the wedding, and the north side mourns the emperor.

Beyond it, Maria-Theresien-Strasse is the city's grand main street, lined with baroque palaces and leading to the old town. In the middle stands St. Anne's Column, raised in 1706 to give thanks for the retreat of the Bavarian army on St. Anne's Day in 1703. Line it up with the Nordkette at the end of the street for the city's other famous photo. For a drink with a view, the roof terraces on top of the Rathausgalerien and the Adlers hotel near the station look straight at the mountains.

Tiroler Gröstl is the dish of Tyrol: potatoes, onions and leftover beef or pork, fried in a pan until crisp and brown and topped with a fried egg, with a cabbage salad on the side. It's farmhouse food made from Sunday's leftovers, and it's on every traditional menu.

Eat it in one of the old inns of the center. The Weisses Rössl, a few steps from the Golden Roof, has fed travelers for centuries,. It's closed on Sundays.

The Tiroler Abend, a folk evening run by the Gundolf family since 1967, now in the Alpensaal by the Messe, is aimed at visitors and makes no secret of it, but it's done with real musicians and dancers: yodeling, the slap dance called the Schuhplattler, alphorns, the zither and the cowbells of the Almabtrieb, when the cattle come down from the high pastures in autumn. It's loud, silly and good fun, and you won't find this many Tyrolean traditions in one room anywhere else.

Hall was Tyrol's richest town for centuries, thanks to the salt mined in the mountains above it from the 13th century, and it has the largest old town in Tyrol, a maze of Gothic and Renaissance houses on the slope above the Inn, almost untouched. Start at the upper town square, with the town hall and its wooden council chamber, and the parish church of St. Nicholas.

It's much quieter than Innsbruck, and it shows you what the old towns of the Alps looked like before tourism. On Saturday mornings there's a farmers' market on the square.

The Habsburgs moved their mint to Hall in 1477, and in 1486 it struck the Guldiner, the first large silver coin of its kind; copies of it struck later in Joachimsthal in Bohemia became the Thaler, and the Thaler, by way of the Dutch and the Spanish, gave its name to the dollar. In 1567 the mint moved into Hasegg Castle, down by the river, where the museum explains the story, you can strike your own coin, and the Mint Tower, the symbol of Hall, has a view over the rooftops and the valley. In winter, from mid-January to mid-March, the mint is open to groups only.

Have lunch at one of the inns around the upper town square, where the menus are short and Tyrolean. This is the place to try Kasspatzln, the Tyrolean version of Käsespätzle: soft egg noodles tossed with strong mountain cheese and topped with crispy fried onions, served in the pan, or Schlutzkrapfen, half-moon ravioli filled with spinach and curd cheese and drenched in brown butter and parmesan.

Daniel Swarovski, a glass cutter from Bohemia, founded his crystal company in Wattens in 1895, and for its centenary in 1995 the Viennese artist André Heller built the Swarovski Crystal Worlds behind the factory. The entrance is a grass-covered giant's head with crystal eyes and a waterfall pouring from its mouth, and inside are the Chambers of Wonder, rooms designed by artists from Keith Haring to Yayoi Kusama.

It's part art, part brand showroom and part theme park, and it ends in the largest Swarovski shop in the world. The garden, with its crystal cloud of 800,000 crystals hanging over a black pool, is the best part.

Start the day at Ambras Castle, on a hill above the southeastern suburbs. Archduke Ferdinand II, son of an emperor, secretly married Philippine Welser, the beautiful daughter of an Augsburg merchant family, in 1557. A commoner couldn't be an archduchess, so their sons could never inherit, and Ferdinand rebuilt this castle for her, away from the court.

He was also an obsessive collector, and his Chamber of Art and Curiosities, still in its original place, is one of the oldest museums in the world: coral, automatons, exotic weapons, portraits of a hairy family and a giant, and things nobody can quite explain. The Spanish Hall, from the 1570s, is one of the most beautiful Renaissance rooms north of the Alps, and the upper castle holds a gallery of Habsburg portraits, chins and all.

The Patscherkofel is Innsbruck's other house mountain, the rounded peak south of the city where the Olympic men's downhill races of 1964 and 1976 were held. Franz Klammer's famous win in 1976, at the edge of control the whole way down, happened here. A new cable car from Igls, opened in 2017, takes you to the top station at 1,965 m in about ten minutes.

From the terrace, the Inn valley and the Nordkette, where you were on day two, lie across the valley, and the Stubai glaciers glitter to the southwest.

The Zirbenweg is one of the classic easy high walks of Tyrol, a 7 km path that runs almost level at around 2,000 m from the Patscherkofel to the Tulfeinalm, through one of the largest forests of Swiss stone pines, Zirben, in Europe. These gnarled, slow-growing trees can live for 1,000 years, and their wood smells so strongly that Tyroleans make beds and pillows from it to sleep better.

It's an easy path, but it's high, so bring water and a jacket. At the Tulfeinalm, the Glungezer lifts, a chairlift and then a gondola, take you down to Tulfes, where buses go to Hall, for the train into Innsbruck, or back to Igls.

Eating at a hut, an Alm or Hütte, is a Tyrolean ritual. At the Tulfeinalm, at the end of the path, order a Marend, a board of Speck, mountain cheese, sausage and dark bread, with a radler or a buttermilk, or a big Kaiserschmarrn, the torn caramelized pancake, with plum compote, which most Tyroleans would say tastes best right here. Finish with a shot of Zirbenschnaps, schnapps in which the cones of the pines you've just walked past have been steeped. The hut is open from June to the start of November, until 4pm, so it's a late lunch.

For the last evening, go back to the old town for dinner under the Gothic arcades, with the Golden Roof lit up outside. Have the dishes you missed: Schlutzkrapfen, Wiener Schnitzel or Tafelspitz, and a glass of wine from the Austrian side of the Alps or a Zillertal beer.

Then take a last walk along the Inn, with the lights of the Seegrube and the Hafelekar shining high on the mountain above the town.