Buildings and building stone: Gasthof Post in Strass, Tirol

Gasthof Post in Strass, Tirol, Austria

The two images above show the Gasthof Post in the town of Strass at the mouth of the Ziller Valley (the Zillertal) east of Innsbruck in the Austrian land of Tirol. The upper of the two images shows the building; the second of them is included to show the backdrop, the Calcareous Alps.

Strass sits near the Inn River. To the north of the Inn Valley are the Calcarous Alps or Kalkalpen, a range of mountains of limestone streching along the northern Alps. To the south are the metamorphic Alps, which consist of metamorphic rocks. The stones of the Gasthof Post reflect this position on a major geologic boundary within the Alps. The light tan and roughly equant stones are blocks of limestone from the Calcareous Alps. The dark gray elongate stones are pieces of slate, a metamorphic rock, from the metamorphic Alps. The stones of this Gasthof thus provide travellers with a reminder of Strass's unique geological setting.

Slate cleaves into flat pieces, and the image above shows it in profile, nicely stacked like bricks. The image below shows a shiny cleaved surface too (at the lower left of the image).

The position of Strass between two geologic provinces is shown on snippet of the University of Innsbruck's Geologic Map of Tirol below. Strass is at the red dot. The blues and purples on the northwest half of the map are limestones and dolostones, whereas the pink, green, and orange to the southeast are all metamorphic rocks. The dashed SW-NE line is a major fault that brought together these two geologic provinces, and so brought together the rocks seen in the Gasthof Post.

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