Osterhofen Town Square

A very nice town square with small shops.

The urban settlement of Osterhofen did not come into being until the late Middle Ages when Landgrave Johann I von Leuchtenberg reestablished it in 1378 near the present-day town of Altenmarkt and its former Premonstratensian monastery. It essentially comprised the area of the town square, which has the shape of a spacious, irregular rectangle. The area is framed like a wall by four closed rows of bourgeois residential buildings and official buildings. These are strictly eaves-sided buildings with plastered fronts and partly high pitched roofs on the south, west and north sides of the square and baroque, neo-baroque and neo-Gothic gabled houses on the east side. In the southwest corner of the square, former stately buildings are concentrated, such as the Leuchtenbergschlössl, which is essentially late medieval, the Traunersche Schlössl, now the town hall, from around 1700 and the former district court from the middle of the 19th century. They tower above the other buildings and document the importance of the city as a court seat.