Salzburg’s skyline of domes and fortress towers was built almost entirely on salt money, funnelled through a thousand years of prince-archbishops who ruled the city as both spiritual and temporal lords. It is also, simply, the town where Mozart was born and where a festival still stages his music every year.
At a glance
Seen from the Mönchsberg cliff across the Salzach River, Salzburg’s old town presents a tight cluster of Baroque domes and towers below the medieval bulk of Hohensalzburg Fortress. The ensemble was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. What looks like an Italian city transplanted north of the Alps is in fact the product of thirteen centuries of continuous rule by the Archbishops of Salzburg, who held both spiritual and secular power over their own independent ecclesiastical state and financed their building campaigns with revenue from the Alpine salt trade.
The city is also inseparable from two later chapters: it is the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and since 1920 it has hosted the Salzburg Festival, founded by Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss, which still opens each year with a performance of Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann on the Cathedral steps. The 1965 film The Sound of Music was also shot partly in the city, including the Mirabell Gardens.
Key facts
- Status: UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996, covering the historic centre
- Salzburg Cathedral: built 1614–1628 for Archbishop Wolf Dietrich after a fire, designed by the Italian architect Santino Solari, with twin towers reaching 79 metres, the first Baroque cathedral north of the Alps
- Hohensalzburg Fortress: founded in 1077 by Archbishop Gebhard, standing on a rock 506 metres above the city and considered the best-preserved medieval castle in Central Europe
- Collegiate Church: built 1696–1707 by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, regarded as the finest Baroque façade in Austria
- Mozart: born in Salzburg in 1756, in a house on Getreidegasse now preserved as a museum
History
The site’s history reaches back to the Roman town of Iuvavum, which fell with the collapse of Roman rule in the region in 477. In 696 the missionary bishop Saint Rupert arrived and founded the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter, beginning the Christianisation of the Bavarian tribes; Boniface later organised the Carolingian church structure, and in 798 Salzburg’s bishopric was raised to an archdiocese. Over the following centuries the Archbishop acquired secular as well as spiritual authority, becoming Prince-Archbishop of an independent ecclesiastical state, and in 1077 Archbishop Gebhard founded Hohensalzburg Fortress on the Mönchsberg.
The city’s Baroque character owes most to Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Archbishop from 1587 to 1612, who cleared much of the medieval town centre after a fire and rebuilt it in Italian Baroque style, bringing in architects such as Santino Solari. His successor Paris Lodron steered Salzburg through the Thirty Years War while keeping the state neutral. In 1731 Archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian expelled the region’s Protestant population, who had survived in secret since the sixteenth century; those affected were given only days to leave and travelled north through a harsh winter, with many resettled by Prussia in East Prussia. Mozart was born in the city in 1756. The ecclesiastical state itself came to an end when Napoleon secularised it in 1803, and by the Peace of Paris in 1816 Salzburg was incorporated into the Austrian Empire. In 1920 Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss founded the Salzburg Festival.
What you see
Salzburg Cathedral dominates the old town with its twin 79-metre towers and a dome over a nave roughly 69 metres long; it was consecrated in 1628 in the presence of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, and its steps have hosted the opening performance of Jedermann every year since the Festival began in 1920. On the Mönchsberg above, Hohensalzburg Fortress was extended in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries by Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach, who added the Golden Hall with its gilded green-tiled stove and a hand-turned barrel organ from 1502 that is still in working order; a funicular built in 1892 carries visitors up the rock.
The Residenz Palace, begun under Wolf Dietrich in 1596 and extended in the early seventeenth century, houses the State Rooms and the Hall of the Prince-Archbishop along with a gallery museum. Mirabell Palace was built in 1606 by Wolf Dietrich for his mistress Salome Alt, with whom he had fifteen children; its Baroque garden, laid out around 1730 to designs associated with Fischer von Erlach, has flower parterres, hedge mazes and a central fountain, and was used for the Do-Re-Mi sequence in The Sound of Music. In the old town, the pedestrian street Getreidegasse leads to Mozart’s birthplace at number nine, now a museum, close to the 1695 Pferdeschwemme horse-trough fountain and the Collegiate Church, both designed by Fischer von Erlach.
Practical information
- Tickets and hours: the Cathedral, Hohensalzburg Fortress, the Residenz and Mozart’s birthplace are all open to visitors; check current times and admission through their official sites before travelling.
- Getting up to the fortress: a funicular dating from 1892 runs up the Mönchsberg to Hohensalzburg Fortress.
- Festival season: the Salzburg Festival stages opera, drama and classical concerts each year, with Jedermann traditionally performed on the Cathedral steps; programme and booking are handled by the Festival’s own office.
Getting there
Salzburg’s old town sits on the eastern bank of the Salzach River, facing the Mönchsberg cliff to the west, and is compact enough to explore on foot once in the centre.
Nearby
- Hallein — one of the historic salt-mining centres whose revenues helped fund Salzburg’s Baroque building programme.
- Hallstatt — another Alpine salt-mining town linked historically to Salzburg through the same salt trade.
Sources
- UNESCO
- Salzburg Festival
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