Bischofshofen

Bischofshofen lies in the Salzach valley of the Pongau, among mountains with a long history of copper mining. Its origins lie in the monastic cell of Saint Maximilian, founded in 711 or 712 and supplied with monks from Salzburg's Saint Peter's Abbey. Destroyed and rebuilt more than once, the foundation later became an Augustinian house and passed to the bishops of Chiemsee around 1216. Their estates gave the settlement its name.

Bischofshofen obtained market and toll rights in the fourteenth century. The Salzburg Peasants' War reached the village in 1525–1526, and later religious disputes brought further unrest. In 1732 thousands of Protestants were expelled from the districts of Bischofshofen and Werfen, many finding refuge in East Prussia. A flood of the Gainfeldbach killed sixteen people in the village in 1775. After Salzburg's ecclesiastical principality was secularised, the district passed to Austria in 1816.