🇦🇹 Austria · Salzburg and the Lakes (Salzkammergut)
Salzburg is one of those cities that seem designed to dazzle. Hemmed in between green mountains and split in two by the river Salzach, its baroque old town — a Unesco World Heritage Site — is a maze of monumental squares, domed churches, secret courtyards and narrow lanes crowned by one of the best preserved medieval fortresses in Europe, the Hohensalzburg, which has watched over the city from the top of its crag for more than nine hundred years.
It is, above all, the city of Mozart: the most famous composer of all time was born here in 1756, and his name is everywhere, from the birthplace on the Getreidegasse to the chocolate balls with his face on them. But Salzburg is much more than Mozart. Its name — 'salt castle' — recalls the real origin of its wealth: for centuries, the powerful prince-archbishops who ruled it grew immensely rich on the salt of the neighbouring mountains, and with that money they built the baroque city we admire today.
This guide covers the essentials of Salzburg in a practical, friendly way: how to organise the fortress and the old town, which Mozart museums are worth it, how the Hellbrunn water games work, when the famous Salzburg Festival falls and how to escape to the lakes of the Salzkammergut. And yes, we will talk about 'The Sound of Music', that tourist phenomenon that fascinates half the world and that, curiously, the people of Salzburg themselves find rather alien.
Salzburg began as the Roman town of Iuvavum, on the river Salzach, and was reborn at the end of the 7th century when Saint Rupert founded St Peter's Abbey and the bishopric. Its name — 'salt castle' — reveals the secret of its power: the salt of the nearby mountains, which made the prince-archbishops who ruled the city as independent sovereigns immensely rich. With that fortune, archbishops such as Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Marcus Sitticus and Paris Lodron transformed the old medieval town into the baroque jewel that is now a World Heritage Site. The Hohensalzburg fortress, begun in 1077, never fell to an enemy. In 1731 and 1732, Archbishop Firmian expelled more than 20,000 Protestants in a dark episode. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born here in 1756, kept a tense relationship with his home city and ended up leaving for Vienna. In 1803 the ecclesiastical principality was secularised and, after the Napoleonic wars, Salzburg passed definitively to Austria in 1816. In 1920 the Salzburg Festival was founded, today the world's great festival of classical music and theatre. In 1938 the city was annexed by Nazi Germany (the Anschluss) and was bombed in the Second World War. It was later reborn as a cultural and tourist capital, helped by the worldwide fame of the film 'The Sound of Music' (1965). The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The land of salt: Hallstatt, which gave its name to Europe's first Iron Age; Salzburg, ruled for centuries by prince-archbishops who grew rich on salt, expelled their Protestants and saw Mozart born; and the imperial Salzkammergut of lakes and mountains, where Franz Joseph declared war in 1914 and where the Nazis hid the art stolen from Europe.
Read the history of Salzburg and the Lakes (Salzkammergut) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The name says it all: Salzburg means 'salt castle'. The whole history of this city is tied to that white mineral that for thousands of years was worth as much as gold, because it was the only way to preserve food. The Celts were already mining salt from these mountains centuries before Christ. But the first city proper was founded by the Romans around 15 BC, on the banks of the river Salzach: they called it Iuvavum and, around AD 45, it was granted the rank of municipium. It was a prosperous provincial centre until, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, it was abandoned and left in ruins.
The city was reborn thanks to the Church. Around the year 696, a noble bishop called Rupert, who came from Worms, arrived at the ruins of Iuvavum on a mission of evangelisation at the request of the Duke of Bavaria. On the remains of the old Roman city, Rupert founded the Benedictine abbey of St Peter (Stift Sankt Peter), which still stands and is still working today: it is the oldest continuously operating monastery in the German-speaking world, with more than 1,300 years of unbroken monastic life. Shortly afterwards, around the year 713, his niece Erentrudis founded the Nonnberg convent, on the mountainside.
The Bavarian duke gave St Peter's Abbey large estates that included brine wells and salt works. The monks revived the old salt trade the Celts had begun, and it was that business that brought the place back to life and gave it its definitive name: Salzburg. In the year 739, Saint Boniface raised the city to a bishopric; in 798, Bishop Arno became the first archbishop of Salzburg. The Church and salt, joined from the very start, would be the two forces that shaped the city for the next thousand years.
During the Middle Ages, the archbishops of Salzburg accumulated not only spiritual power but political power too. In time they became prince-archbishops: sovereigns who governed a small independent ecclesiastical state within the Holy Roman Empire, with their own laws, their own currency and their own army. And the source of their enormous wealth was always the same: the salt of the neighbouring mountains, sold throughout central Europe.
That fortune allowed them to rule as true princes and to protect themselves in the Hohensalzburg fortress, begun in 1077 by Archbishop Gebhard during the Investiture Controversy (the conflict between the Pope and the Emperor) and extended over the centuries until it became one of the largest medieval fortresses in Europe. It was never taken by an enemy in combat.
But the Salzburg we admire today, that of the domes and the marble squares, was born above all between the 16th and 17th centuries, when a series of ambitious archbishops decided to transform the old medieval town into a baroque capital in the Italian style, 'the Rome of the North'. Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, at the end of the 16th century, had whole districts demolished to lay out wide squares and planned a new cathedral; he also built Mirabell Palace for his mistress, Salome Alt, with whom he had fifteen children, a scandal that ended up costing him his office and his freedom. His successor, Marcus Sitticus, built Hellbrunn Palace with its water games and finished the cathedral. And Paris Lodron governed during the Thirty Years' War, keeping Salzburg neutral and at peace, and founded the university. It is to them that we owe the old town Unesco declared a World Heritage Site in 1996.
Not all of Salzburg's history is gilded marble. One of the darkest episodes came in the 18th century, when the absolute power of the prince-archbishops over the consciences of their subjects turned into a tragedy. Even though Salzburg was a Catholic state, secret communities of Protestant peasants had survived for generations in the Alpine valleys of the region, practising their faith in hiding.
In 1731, the prince-archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian decided to be rid of them. On 31 October of that year — a date deliberately chosen, the anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation — he issued an edict of expulsion. The Protestants were ordered to leave the principality; the poorest, in barely eight days. Between April and August 1732, more than 20,000 people were forced to leave their land and their homes, marching in columns of about 800 emigrants each across the whole of Germany.
Most accepted the offer of King Frederick William I of Prussia, who took them in and resettled them in his eastern territories, in what is now Prussian Lithuania; others scattered across various Protestant states in Europe and some even reached the British colonies in America, where they founded communities such as Ebenezer, in Georgia. The expulsion of the Salzburg Protestants shocked European public opinion at the time and remains one of the great episodes of religious intolerance of the 18th century. It is a part of the city's history worth knowing honestly, without embellishment and without forgetting.
On 27 January 1756, on the third floor of a house on the Getreidegasse, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born, Salzburg's most famous son and one of the musical geniuses of all time. He was baptised the following day in the cathedral, in the same font that is still there. A child prodigy, by the age of six he was already touring the courts of Europe playing the harpsichord and the violin, put on show by his father, Leopold, a musician at the archbishop's court.
Mozart's relationship with his home city, however, was tense and, over the years, frankly bad. As a young man he worked as a musician in the service of the prince-archbishop Hieronymus Colloredo, but the closed, provincial atmosphere of the Salzburg court felt suffocating to him, and relations with his patron became unbearable. In 1781, after a famous argument, Mozart was literally dismissed from the archbishop's service 'with a kick in the backside', as the anecdote has it, and left for Vienna to seek his fortune as an independent musician. He never lived in Salzburg again. He died in Vienna in 1791, at just 35.
There is an enormous irony in all this: the city Mozart wanted to leave behind has built much of its identity and its tourism around his name. His face is on the famous chocolate balls (the Mozartkugeln), his birthplace is one of the most visited museums in Austria, there are 'Mozart' concerts everywhere and even the airport bears his name. Salzburg, which failed to keep him in his lifetime, embraces him today as its eternal symbol. In 1842 a statue was erected to him on the square that bears his name, and in 1880 the Mozarteum Foundation was set up, dedicated to preserving his legacy.
The thousand-year-old power of the prince-archbishops came to an abrupt end at the beginning of the 19th century, swept away by the storm of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. In 1803, as part of the reorganisation of Germany, the ecclesiastical principality of Salzburg was secularised: it stopped being a church state and became briefly an electorate and then a secular duchy. Over the following years, the city changed hands several times — it even belonged to Bavaria — until, after the fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, in 1816 Salzburg became definitively part of the Austrian Empire. It had gone from being a sovereign capital to a provincial city.
After a rather subdued 19th century, Salzburg found in the 20th a new calling that would make it world famous: music and theatre. In 1920, in the difficult years after the First World War and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a group of artists led by the director Max Reinhardt, the composer Richard Strauss and the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal founded the Salzburg Festival (Salzburger Festspiele). The first performance was the drama 'Jedermann' ('Everyman') on the cathedral square, a tradition that continues to this day.
The Festival turned Salzburg into the world capital of the musical summer: every year, for six weeks, the city fills with the best conductors, orchestras, singers and actors on the planet, and with an international, elegant audience. Along with Mozart's legacy and the baroque old town, it is one of the three pillars on which the city's cultural identity and much of its tourist economy rest.
The 20th century also brought Salzburg its darkest hours. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the so-called Anschluss, and Salzburg was absorbed into the Third Reich. As in the rest of the country, Jews and opponents were persecuted; the synagogue was attacked and the Jewish community destroyed. During the Second World War, the city suffered several Allied bombing raids that damaged the cathedral and much of the centre, although many of its main monuments, including the fortress, survived. In 1945, American troops occupied the city, which remained in the American occupation zone until Austria regained full sovereignty in 1955.
After the war, Salzburg was carefully rebuilt and flourished again as a cultural and tourist capital. An unexpected episode launched it to worldwide fame: in 1965 the American film 'The Sound of Music' was released, based on the true story of the von Trapp family and shot in Salzburg and its surroundings. The film was a global hit and still draws crowds of tourists today — above all Americans and Asians — who tour its locations. Curiously, most people in Salzburg barely know the film: it is an almost alien phenomenon for the city's own inhabitants, who watch it with a mixture of surprise and good humour.
Today Salzburg is a prosperous city of around 155,000 inhabitants, with a university, an intense cultural life and an old town that Unesco protects as World Heritage. It is the gateway to the Salzkammergut, the region of lakes and mountains that surrounds it, and one of the most visited cities in Austria. Thirteen hundred years after Saint Rupert, it is still the city of salt, of the archbishops, of Mozart and of music: a small, great baroque stage wedged between the Alps.