Tyrol Castle was the ancestral seat of the Counts of Tyrol, who gave the region its name. A first castle stood here before 1100. A second phase, including the keep, followed in 1139 or 1140, and a third came in the second half of the 13th century under Count Meinhard II. The article names no architect. It notes Romanesque portals with marble sculptures, and chapel frescoes.
Countess Margaret was besieged here by forces of Charles IV in 1347. In 1420 Archduke Frederick IV moved the administrative seat to Innsbruck. Later, parts of the castle fell into the Köstengraben gorge, and it was sold for use as a quarry. The keep was rebuilt in 1904.
It has been a museum since the early 1980s and has housed the South Tyrolean Museum of History since 2003.
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