Brixen

Brixen stands at the meeting of the Eisack and Rienz rivers, in a valley leading towards the Brenner Pass. A document of 901 records the farm of Prihsna as a gift to the bishop of Säben. The bishops moved their seat to Brixen in 992, after the cathedral was completed, and the town grew around its church. A first circuit of walls was finished in 1115, though fires devastated Brixen in 1174, 1234 and 1445.

The town was the seat of an ecclesiastical principality for centuries. In the Napoleonic reorganisation, Brixen passed to Austria and then to Bavaria in 1805. Bavarian authorities established a district court here, but their rule was brief: Brixen returned to Austria in 1814. Its cathedral and the bishops' residence continued to mark the town's long role as a religious and administrative centre in the Alpine valleys.