Mount Isel is probably the most important place of remembrance of Catholic and conservative Tyrolean identity. In 1809, the riflemen under Captain Andreas Hofer were able to defeat the army of the Bavarians and French, who had occupied Tyrol during the Napoleonic Wars, at this location. Andreas Hofer gradually became a mythical figure in 19th century nationalism and is still regarded as a folk hero by many Tyroleans today. In the Tirol Panorama you can find a representation of this fight for freedom in large format. The giant circular painting is Tyrol's largest work of art. Until 2011, the painting could be found in the rotunda at the old valley station of the Hungerburg cable car in Saggen before it was moved to the newly built Museum am Berg Isel. It depicts the Third Battle of Berg Isel on over 1000 square metres. It not only shows the battle of 13 August in great detail, but also gives a very good impression of Innsbruck and the surrounding area in 1809. It was painted by the Munich artist Dino Ziemer under the supervision of the Tyrolean Franz Defreggers. Before the First World War, this collaboration was also an expression of the reconciliation between Tyrol and Bavaria as well as the new allies, the German Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Within the German-speaking population, the "freiheitsliebende Tiroler Widerstand“ unter Andreas Hofer im Laufe der Zeit immer mehr zu einem Mythos überhöht. Diesem Schema folgt auch das Bild. Andreas Hofer, der als stoischer Feldherr dargestellt wird. Tatsächlich war er wohl gar nicht im Schlachtgetümmel, sondern hinter der Frontlinie im Gasthof Schupfenwhere the Tyrolean command post was located. In other respects, too, the depiction of the picture is only peripherally faithful to the facts, which does not detract from the pleasure of viewing the panoramic picture and the city of Innsbruck in 1809.

Gegenüber dem Riesenrundgemälde befindet sich das Kaiserjägermuseum. Erbaut wurde es 1848 als Militärgebäude samt Offizierscasino, jedoch schon 1880 in ein Museum umgewandelt, das die Geschichte der Tiroler Kaiserjäger beleuchtet. Diese Regimenter wurden nach den napoleonischen Kriegen von Kaiser Franz I., dem ersten österreichischen Kaiser, persönlich ins Leben gerufen. Die Kaiserjäger waren im 19. Jahrhundert vor allem in den Italienischen Unabhängigkeitskriegen and in the campaign in Bosnia. During the First World War, they were first sent to Galicia as regular troops of the Habsburg Monarchy before defending the Tyrolean borders in the mountain war against Italy. The museum commemorates the history of the Kaiserjäger with paintings, uniforms, weapons and models. Also on display is the Eiserne Blumenteufel. Funds were set up in the monarchy to collect donations for the relatives of fallen soldiers. Donors were allowed to drive a nail into the Flower devil hunt. The newspaper of 2 July, shortly after the outbreak of war, wrote about it:

„Die Benagelung des zur Schaffung eines Fonds für Witwen und Waisen nach gefallenen Tiroler Kriegern gewidmeten „Eisernen Blumenteufels“, der früher im 1. Stock und jetzt in der Einfahrt des Landhauses aufgestellt ist, macht ganz ansehnliche Fortschritte. Die Kappe, der Brustteil und der Turnister, sowie ein Teil des linken Armes sind schon vollständig, und, wie man sieht, unter fachmännischer Leitung benagelt worden. Wie wir erfahren, waren bis Sonntag bereits 31.000 Nägel eingeschlagen, was zum Ruhme unserer opferfreudigen Bevölkerung umso mehr bedeutet, als erst vor kurzem aus Wien gemeldet wurde, daß der dortige Wehrmann in Eisen bereits mit 100.000 Nägeln beschlagen sei.“

Das ebenfalls im Kaiserjägermuseum ausgestellte Ehrenbuch umfasst 157 Bände, in denen die Namen der 1809 und in den beiden Weltkriegen gefallenen Tiroler handschriftliche aufgezeichnet wurden. 1959 ließ die Tiroler Landesregierung die Ehrenhalle der Kaiserjäger um die Gedenkkapelle „Unserer hohen Frau von Tirol". Since 1930, Mount Isel has been a foundation in eternal memory of the four Tyrolean Kaiserjäger regiments.

The small park in front of the two museums was the firing range of the Tyrolean Kaiserjäger in the 19th century. The shooting ranges at the southern end of the square are well worth seeing. It has always been customary for subjects to train in military skills and the use of weapons. There were several shooting ranges in and around Innsbruck. Shooting clubs still uphold this tradition today, even if it is increasingly being criticised for its often dubious understanding of Tyrolean culture.

The Andreas Hofer monument occupies the most prominent position. A committee was set up to collect donations for the erection of the monument. Mount Isel was to be named "Heldenberg“ represent the idea of Tyrolean identity from the perspective of conservative circles and provide a contrast to monuments such as the Rudolfsbrunnen, which promoted liberal circles in the city. Emperor Franz Josef was present at the ceremonial opening in 1893. After 1918, the Andreas Hofer monument became a memorial to the lost Tyrolean unity. In 1961, the statue made it into the media in this context. Unknown persons had blown up the monument. To this day, there is a version of the story that it was orchestrated by the Italian government. Vendetta for the attacks of the radical Liberation Committee traded.

To the west of the Andreas Hofers monument, a chapel and a bronze statue of Emperor Franz Josef I adorn the square. The building at the western end of the square, the Urichhaus, has served as an officers' mess and administrative centre since 1893 and is now home to the local branch of the Tyrolean Kaiserjägerbund and the Alt-Kaiserjäger-Club and a military science library. The summer officers' mess was built between 1893 and 1895 in the Heimatstil style according to plans by Eduard Klingler.

As early as the 19th century, Mount Isel had become a favourite destination for Innsbruck residents. Unmarried couples in particular appreciated the relative seclusion on walks to follow the new fashion of the Flirtens away from prying eyes. Flirting now takes place elsewhere, but walkers and hikers still get their money's worth on Berg Isel. A hiking trail leads from the museum car park around Berg Isel. The path is pleasant to walk and offers a magnificent panorama. The highlight is the Sonnendeck viewing platform, where you can look down into the Sill Gorge from a dizzying height. The 2 kilometre walk is suitable for anyone with a normal level of fitness. Families with children can also tackle the circular trail. If you like, you can branch off along the way and take a detour to the beautiful Sillschlucht recreation area.

Away from the museums and monuments, Mount Isel becomes Innsbruck's Olympic landmark. Ski jumping has a long tradition in Tyrol. In the early 1920s, the sport invented by Norwegians was practised by daring athletes on ski jumps in Seefeld or near Heiligwasser on the Patscherkofel. In 1927, the first official ski jumping event took place on Mount Isel as part of the Tyrolean Skiing Championships. The athletes and spectators had to make do with a natural ski jump in the first year. A tower was built the following year. The ski jumping facility was extended in 1933 for the World Ski Championships in Innsbruck, not only to beat the record distance of 63 metres, but also to cope with the crowds of spectators. Jakob Albert played a key role in the planning. The diving tower collapsed during the war and was only rebuilt after the Second World War.

The highlights on Mount Isel were the 1964 and 1976 Olympic Games, which finally made Innsbruck world-famous as a winter sports destination. The ski jump made even greater distances possible after the reconstruction, and the new arena was the venue for both openings. The Olympic rings on the outrun are a reminder of these memorable events for the Berg-Isel and Innsbruck.

In 1985 and 2019 (Seefeld), further major sporting events took place on Mount Isel with the World Championships. Ski jumping fans from all over the world come every year to the Four hills tour to Innsbruck, when the best athletes boldly venture over the inrun and jump into the sizzling atmosphere in the Berg Isel stadium. For the international competition between Tyrol and Bavaria in the form of their ski jumpers, Andreas Hofer and the Tyrolean "Fight for freedom" from 1809 as a comparison.

The facility also served as a stage away from sport. Pope John Paul II was welcomed by tens of thousands of believers in 1988 and held a mass. A dark chapter in Innsbruck's city history occurred in 1999 at the snowboard festival Air&Style. Bei einer Massenpanik wurden 40 Menschen schwer verletzt, fünf Opfer erlagen ihren Verletzungen.

Many Innsbruck residents were there live as spectators from the Olympic Bridge in 2002 when the concrete tower collapsed to make way for the new ski jump. The design of the ski jump as it looks today is the work of star architect Zaha Hadid, who was also in charge of the new Hungerburgbahn. A lift takes you up to the ski jump where you can enjoy coffee and cake high above Innsbruck with a fantastic panorama.

On the south-western outskirts of the city, the Mentlberg Castle and pilgrimage church are two little-noticed gems of Innsbruck's history. The ensemble has probably undergone the most changes of use and ownership of all. Aristocratic residence, place of pilgrimage, hotel, boarding school, barracks, sports centre - nowhere is Innsbruck as versatile as at the foot of the Wiltenberg.

The castle was given its current appearance in 1905. The French Prince Ferdinand of Bourbon-Orleans, Duke of Vendom, had acquired the castle 15 years earlier for himself and his wife Sophie, a sister of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth, as a hunting lodge, farm and holiday home. It was probably the location on the edge of the forest, close to the town in the middle of the Alps, that particularly appealed to the couple. Sissi, like her sister more fond of country life than the strict court etiquette of Vienna, was a frequent guest. Fully committed to the French high aristocracy, the prince had his estate remodelled in the spirit of historicism in the form of a Loire castle in order to have at least a small piece of home in the province of the German hereditary enemy. The neo-Gothic tower at the east end with its pyramid-shaped roof bears the coat of arms of the French aristocratic house.

In order to fully satisfy his and his Bavarian wife's rural desires, the Duke also acquired the so-called Lower FiggeThe site is now Sieglanger on the banks of the Inn, where he had stables, garages, a park with a greenhouse and a staff annex built.

However, the history of the estate goes back much further. It was first mentioned in 1305 as an estate of Wilten Abbey. The Courtyard on the Gallwiese comprised several hectares of land and the forest rights on the Wiltenberg. Elevated in front of the town, Mentlberg was ideal for a watchtower. Via beacons, so-called Chalk fire the town could be warned of approaching danger. The abbots of Wilten came here on summer holidays to spend the hot season away from monastery politics.

Heinrich Mentlberger, owner of today's Weinhaus Happ, town magistrate and mayor, acquired the estate from Wilten Abbey in 1485. The enterprising contemporary of Maximilian was elevated to the nobility by his sovereign as a member of the Imperial Council, which transformed Mentlberg from a country estate into the baronial noble estate that gave it its name.

Numerous changes of ownership within the aristocracy followed over the next few centuries before Leopold Lindner acquired the estate in 1884. Lindner did not come from the aristocracy, but his ancestors had made a considerable fortune with the Wilten-based company Rosenbachers Eidam as a supplier of court wax goods. Lindner saw the estate's tourism potential in this time of new beginnings and the gold rush of tourism. With Egerdach to the east and Mühlau to the north of the town, there were already two successful spa and bathing establishments near Innsbruck. A hotel boarding house was built in the count's ambience, where guests enjoyed treatments such as spruce needle, brine and mineral baths. After just six years, Mentlberg was sold to the French Duke of Vendome.

The First World War gave the estate a new use. Like Ambras Castle, Mentlberg also became a military hospital. Soldiers were treated in the lung sanatorium. Despite the renovation of the castle at public expense after the war, Duke Ferdinand von Bourbon-Orleans wanted to get rid of his Austrian property. In 1926, the province of Tyrol, an association of Innsbruck innkeepers led by the Hotel Grauer Bär as well as the Alpine Holzindustrie GmbH from Ljubljana for Mentlberg Castle and the associated property. Ljubljana had only recently ceased to be part of the Austrian monarchy and had become part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but the economic ties had remained intact. The Yugoslavian company acquired the property for 400,000 schillings.

However, the plan to turn the castle into a hotel again failed after initial euphoria and high investments. Just two years later, the 70 hectares of land went to the state of Tyrol for 600,000 schillings. The Gallwiesenhof on the Mentlberg was to be transformed into a model estate for agricultural training purposes, with the castle serving as accommodation for the students and apprentices of the educational establishment. The bold plan to Lower Figge to build a bathing beach on the Inn never materialised. Instead, the land was used in the 1930s for the construction of the Dollfuß and fishermen's housing estate.

In 1932, the castle was to be used as a home for mothers and babies, but this proposal was rejected by the provincial parliament due to the overly ostentatious ambience. In the financially difficult times after the economic crisis, the provincial government decided to lease the castle as a hotel for 6,000 shillings in order to relieve the provincial budget.

The plan to organise the slalom of the 1933 World Ski Championships on the Mentlberg also failed, not because of finances but because of the snow conditions, at least in that year. The following year, the slopes next to the castle ""...the 40 best-placed downhill skiers in the Pfriemesköpfl - Mutters race... for the prize of honour of Federal Chancellor Dr Dollfuß...“

In the late 1930s and the post-war period, Mentlberg Castle was used for military and administrative purposes. After being used as a barracks by the Austrian army, it was the location of the Reich Labour Service. Under the law, young men and women were obliged to work as Soldiers of labour to take on charitable work. In addition to the educational and disciplinary component of this service as part of propaganda, the Nazi regime also succeeded in drastically reducing the unemployment figures in the areas newly annexed to the Reich in one fell swoop. After the war, the French occupying forces took up residence in the castle for a short time before it once again became a school and apprenticeship centre. After 2015, the building was used as a refugee centre. The province of Tyrol is currently converting Mentlberg into a centre for disaster control in compliance with the preservation order.

To the east of the castle is the Mentlberg pilgrimage church, a classic product of the Baroque period. An officer in the imperial army brought a statue of the Mother of God with the body of Jesus back to Tyrol from his deployment in the Thirty Years' War (1618 - 1648). Due to economic hardship and war, the 17th century was the heyday of Christian superstition, in which people attributed their personal fate to the intervention of saints. The soldier's father, Ferdinand von Khuepach, zu Ried, was the owner of Mentlberg Castle and decided to erect the wooden figure in the small chapel on his estate. Similar to the Tummelplatz, the "Sorrowful mother on the Gallwiese" miraculous healings here too. Wilten Abbey reacted quickly to promote the pilgrimage. The abbot had seven picture pillars erected along the path from Wilten to Mentlberg and renovated the ageing chapel. The Seven Sleepers, an ancient legend of seven young martyrs from Ephesus, were particularly revered as intercessors in cases of high fever and insomnia. The abbot of Wilten Abbey therefore had a depiction of the grotto in which the seven boys were imprisoned erected in the chapel.

In the 18th century, Mentlberg had become a veritable place of pilgrimage. In 1770, the rococo-style church, which still exists today, was built according to plans by Konstantin Johann Walter, who was also the architect of the Triumphal Gate and the remodelling of the Hofburg. The Grotto of the Seven Sleepers was integrated into the new church, as were the altarpiece of the Mother of Mercy and the wooden sculpture. Votive images still bear witness to the pious citizens' belief in miracles.

Today, the church on Mentlberg is extremely popular with wedding couples due to its pleasant size, the beautiful baroque interior and the view of the city of Innsbruck.

The well-organised little houses in the housing estate in the west of the city with the front gardens on the quiet street are reminiscent of an American suburb from the 1950s. Unlike the suburbs on the other side of the Atlantic, however, Sieglanger was built before the war. At the beginning of the 1930s, when the misery of the Great Depression had also replaced the misery of the post-war period in Tyrol, the city of Innsbruck was faced with a dilemma. The city coffers were empty and at the same time the number of people moving to Innsbruck was increasing. People came to the city to find work, although unemployment here was also unimaginably high by today's standards. According to estimates, every fourth adult Austrian was unemployed in the early 1930s. Added to this was inflation, which had destroyed a great deal of wealth. During this time, a new housing estate was built in the east of Innsbruck between today's Gumppstraße and the Long way the Bocksiedlung, a wild collection of shacks that was more or less autonomously administered from the rest of the city until the early 1960s.

In order to counteract the urban planning chaos, under Mayor Franz Fischer and Federal Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß, municipal housing construction began to be promoted. However, this required the help of the Republic, as the municipality could not finance these plans on its own. The area to the west of the city had been a fief of Wilten Abbey, on which a manor house was built in the 15th century, today's Mentlberg Castle. Historical maps show the differences between the undeveloped state in 1930 in various stages up to the densified settlement from 1980 onwards. In the 19th century, the area on which today's popularly known Zieglstadl a brickworks stands on the site of the prison. Today's Sieglanger am Inn was a Lower Figge known and unbuilt. The buildings that were erected reflected the basic social policy of the Austrofascist regime of the Austrian corporative state under Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß and his successor Kurt Schuschnigg. Unlike the large buildings that emerged from the "red" Vienna and arranged in blocks like castles around courtyards, the small, detached houses with front gardens were intended to simulate a rural idyll. The rural family as a Catholic nucleus was intended to counter the socialist ideal of the large, republican community. Ideologically speaking, this housing estate in the west of the city was the opposite of the projects in neighbourhoods such as the Mandelsberger settlement in Wilten or the Pembau block in Pradl. The idea behind the Sieglanger was identical to that of US conservative politicians in the post-war period when they were building new suburbs.

The individual housing estates were built from 1934 onwards. As the city's building director, Jakob Alberts implemented this project without his social democratically orientated partner Theodor Prachensky, who was usually consulted for the planning. One of the housing estates was named after the mayor of Innsbruck, Franz Fischer, in Fishermen's settlement the second, which was built by the construction company Home had been built by Siglanger No 61 - 93 was Dr-Dollfuß-Siedlung baptised. The future residents helped to build their homes. Similar to the Höttinger Au housing estates, central self-catering gardens were also created.

Despite many conversions, many of the little houses with their distinctive pointed roofs are still standing today. After the Second World War, the estate became more densely populated. In 1964, the motorway was built, which today borders the Sieglanger to the north in a less picturesque way. Sieglanger is no longer a social housing estate, but a middle-class neighbourhood on the western outskirts of Innsbruck in the immediate vicinity of Mentlberg Castle and church.