Badgastein

Bad Gastein is a spa city inside the district of St. Johann im Pongau, in the Austrian kingdom of Salzburg. Picturesquely located in a excessive valley of the Hohe Tauern mountain range, it's far regarded for the Gastein Waterfall and a selection of Belle Epoque lodge homes. The far flung valley turned into settled by using Bavarian peasants in the 9th century; discipline names inside the maximum-lying southern parts also denote a Carantanian colonization.

Gastein is first cited as Gastuna in a 963 deed, while the vicinity belonged to the German stem duchy of Bavaria. It turned into initially an alpine farming and gold mining region and the web site of an ancient trade route crossing the primary ridge of the Central Eastern Alps. In 1297 Duke Otto III and his brother Stephen I, both particularly indebted, bought it to the Prince-Archbishops of Salzburg. Already approximately 1230, the minnesinger Neidhart von Reuental had noted the new springs in his Middle High German poem Die Graserin in der Gastein; the spas have been visited by means of the Habsburg emperor Frederick III in addition to by the Renaissance health practitioner Paracelsus.