Innsbruck Hofburg, the Other Imperial Palace Where Maria Theresa Lost Her Husband
Vienna's Hofburg gets the crowds, but the Habsburgs had a second Hofburg in Innsbruck, and it holds one of the saddest stories in the family. It's smaller, easier to see in a morning, and it comes with the best tomb in Austria next door.
It sits on the Rennweg at the edge of Innsbruck's old town, a long Baroque front a few minutes' walk from the Golden Roof. Like the Vienna palace, it belongs to the Republic and is run by the Burghauptmannschaft.
Two emperors and an empress
The palace started as a Gothic residence for the rulers of Tyrol in the 15th century. Archduke Sigismund began it. Maximilian I, who loved Innsbruck and made it one of his main seats, extended it in the 1490s; in 1499 his court painter Jörg Kölderer turned the old Rumer Gate into the Heraldic Tower, covered in coats of arms.
What you see today is mostly Maria Theresa's. From 1754 she had the palace rebuilt as a Baroque residence, in two phases broken by the Seven Years' War. The main front on Rennweg dates from 1766 to 1773, with Nikolaus Pacassi, her court architect in Vienna as well, in charge of the design.
Then came August 1765. The court travelled to Innsbruck for the wedding of her son Leopold, the future Leopold II, to Maria Ludovica of Spain on 4 August. About 2,000 guests came. Two weeks later, on 18 August, her husband Emperor Francis I Stephen collapsed and died in the palace, on his way back from the theatre.
Maria Theresa wore mourning for the rest of her life. In Innsbruck she turned the room where he died into a chapel, built in 1765 and 1766, and it's part of the visit.
The Giant Hall
The Riesensaal, the Giant Hall, is the palace's showpiece and the most important festival hall in western Austria. Its walls carry full-length portraits of Maria Theresa, Francis Stephen and their sixteen children, painted by Martin van Meytens and his workshop after 1765. The ceiling fresco by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, painted in the 1770s, celebrates the union of the houses of Habsburg and Lorraine. It's a family album built to the scale of a ballroom, and it still hosts events.
The imperial apartments around it show how the court lived on its stays in Tyrol, and there's a separate exhibition on Maximilian I.
Tickets, as of October 2026
- Imperial Apartments: €10.50, reduced €8
- Maximilian exhibition: €8.50, reduced €6
- Both: €16, reduced €11
- Under 19 free; on Sundays, two adults with children under 19 also get in free
Open daily 9:00 to 17:00, last entry 16:30. The palace closes for maintenance from 11 January to 7 February 2027.
Next door, the Hofkirche
Walk around the corner to the Hofkirche on Universitätsstraße. Ferdinand I began it in 1553 as a memorial to his grandfather Maximilian I, and the centre of the nave is filled by Maximilian's tomb, ringed by 28 larger-than-life bronze figures of real and imagined ancestors, cast between 1502 and 1555. Albrecht Dürer designed three of them. Eight are women. Locals call the church the Schwarzmanderkirche, the church of the black men, after the dark bronze.
The tomb is empty. Maximilian is buried in Wiener Neustadt, where he was born.
Also in the church: the grave of Andreas Hofer, the Tyrolean leader of the 1809 uprising against Napoleon and Bavaria, and the Silver Chapel with the tombs of Archduke Ferdinand II and his wife Philippine Welser.
A few minutes away in the old town is the Golden Roof, the oriel Maximilian had covered with 2,657 fire-gilded copper tiles around 1500.
For the main palace in Vienna, start with our guide to the Hofburg's wings and history.