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Though it gave it's name to Styria, this Austrian town is actually in the province of Upper Austria, about a third of the way from Salzburg to Vienna, south of Linz and the east-west Autobahn.
Your first look at it's picturesque Altstadt, set on a peninsula formed by the confluence of the Steyr and Enns rivers, will make you wonder what took you so long to get here.
Entrance to the town is through an arched stone gate, part of the wall that protected the city in medieval times. Inside, a broad square is lined with well-preserved Gothic and Renaissance buildings. Further on, the square funnels down to become the town's alley-size main shopping street, the Eisengasse, and eventually passes through another gate and on to where the rivers join.
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Town records go back to 980 when the Styraburg - now Lamberg Castle - was built. A fire destroyed Steyr in 1727, but in the middle of the 19th century a local lad named Joseph Werndl came to the rescue. He began to manufacture guns and Steyr became one of Europe's main weapons suppliers, an activity that continued through two world wars. (On a more positive note, Werndl and Steyr are given credit for erecting Europe's first electric street lights in 1884.) Werndl's company eventually became Steyr-Daimler-Puch, a World War II arms producer and the town's industrial installations were heavily bombed in 1944. Until 1955, Steyr was the border town between the occupied American and Soviet zones. These days the city still makes it's living in the iron trade: the Steyr-Puch company builds motorbikes and there is also a BMW truck assembly plant.
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