5 Days in Salzburg

Getreidegasse is the old town's main street, narrow and tall, and it's the wrought-iron signs hanging over every shop that make it famous: golden keys, pretzels and boots, and even a McDonald's that had to make do with a discreet iron sign of its own. Duck through the passages between the houses, the Durchhäuser, into the courtyards and out to Universitätsplatz, where the Grünmarkt sells fruit, bread and sausages from Monday to Saturday.

At number 9, behind a yellow facade, is Mozart's Birthplace. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born on the third floor on 27 January 1756, and the family lived here for 26 years. Inside you'll see his childhood violin, his clavichord and portraits of the family. It's small and crowded, but it's where it all began.

Five minutes away, Salzburg Cathedral is the archbishops' answer to St. Peter's in Rome: a huge white baroque church by the Italian architect Santino Solari, consecrated in 1628. The older cathedral burned in 1598, and the story goes that Archbishop Wolf Dietrich, who wanted a grander one anyway, was in no hurry to put the fire out. Mozart was baptized in the bronze font inside, the day after he was born, and later played the organ here.

A bomb went through the dome in 1944; the copy that replaced it was finished in 1959. Next door, the DomQuartier links the cathedral to the archbishops' palace, the Residenz, in one route: the state rooms where the young Mozart performed, the Long Gallery of the abbey, and the organ gallery high inside the cathedral itself. The Residenz Gallery's paintings are off display while it's rebuilt, until about autumn 2027. Outside, Residenzplatz has the biggest baroque fountain north of the Alps, and on Kapitelplatz a man stands on a giant golden ball, a 2007 artwork called Sphaera.

On Alter Markt, the little market square, Café Tomaselli has served coffee since 1700 and calls itself the oldest coffee house in Austria. Mozart's widow Constanze lived upstairs with her second husband. Sit on the terrace or in the wood-paneled rooms, order an Einspänner, and wait for the waitress who walks around with a tray of cakes for you to choose from.

A few doors away, on Brodgasse, is the shop of Café Konditorei Fürst, where the confectioner Paul Fürst is credited with creating the Mozartkugel in 1890: a ball of pistachio marzipan and nougat dipped in dark chocolate. Fürst's are still made by hand, wrapped in silver and blue foil and sold only in its own shops. The red and gold ones in every supermarket are factory copies. Fürst has been to court more than once to defend its name, In 2026 a rival confectioner across the square, Holzermayr, went to court with an advertisement for Mozartkugeln from 1881, and in June a Salzburg court sided with Fürst.

Behind the cathedral, St. Peter's Abbey was founded by Saint Rupert around 696 and is the oldest monastery in the German-speaking world still in use. Its cemetery, set against the cliff of the Mönchsberg, is one of the most beautiful anywhere: wrought-iron crosses, flowers on every grave and arcades of family tombs. Mozart's sister Nannerl and the composer Michael Haydn, Joseph's brother, are buried here.

Carved into the rock above are the catacombs, chapels and hermits' cells reached by steep wooden stairs. Sound of Music fans know the cemetery from the scene where the family hides from the Nazis; it was filmed on a copy built in Hollywood. Next door, St. Peter Stiftskulinarium claims to be the oldest restaurant in Central Europe, mentioned as early as 803.

Walk on past the Franciscan Church, Romanesque and Gothic with a high baroque altar, and through the arcaded Toscaninihof to Hofstallgasse, the street of the Festival halls. The Felsenreitschule, the archbishops' riding school cut into the cliff, is now one of the Festival's stages; guided tours take you inside. At the end of the street, the Pferdeschwemme is a baroque horse trough painted with rearing horses, and behind Getreidegasse, on Universitätsplatz, rises Fischer von Erlach's Kollegienkirche.

The funicular from Festungsgasse, running since 1892, takes a minute to climb to Hohensalzburg Fortress, one of the largest medieval castles in Europe to survive intact. Archbishop Gebhard began it in 1077, during the struggle between pope and emperor, and his successors kept adding to it for 600 years. Archbishop Leonhard von Keutschach gave it most of its present shape around 1500, and you'll see his coat of arms, a turnip, carved all over it.

In all that time, nobody ever took it by force: the only time it surrendered was to Napoleon's troops in 1800, without a fight. Inside, the Golden Hall and Golden Chamber are the archbishops' state rooms, and a mechanical organ from 1502, the Salzburg Bull, still roars over the town several times a day. The real reason to come is the view: the old town's domes below you on one side, and on the other the Alps.

Walk down the eastern side of the hill to Nonnberg Abbey, founded by Rupert around 714 for his niece Erentrudis and home to Benedictine nuns ever since, which makes it the oldest convent in the German-speaking world still running. The Gothic church is dark and quiet, and you can hear the nuns sing their evening prayer.

This is where the real Maria Augusta Kutschera was a novice before she was sent to tutor one of Georg von Trapp's children. She married him here in 1927, and the family's real story was quite different from the film's: they left in 1938 by train to Italy, openly, not over the mountains, which would have taken them to Germany.

Finish the day with the city's own dessert. Salzburger Nockerl is a sweet soufflé of egg whites, sugar and a little flour, baked in three golden peaks that stand for the three hills around the town, on a layer of berry sauce, and dusted with powdered sugar like snow. It's huge, light and gone in minutes, and one is plenty for two.

Order it at the start of the meal, since it takes about 20 minutes to bake. The traditional inns of the old town make it: Sternbräu, with its courtyards between Getreidegasse and Griesgasse, which also does a portion for one, s'Herzl on Karajanplatz, the rustic inn of the Goldener Hirsch hotel, and St. Peter Stiftskulinarium. Have a Wiener Schnitzel or Kasnocken first.

Every Thursday morning since 1906, farmers from all over the state of Salzburg have set up stalls around St. Andrä church for the Schranne, the market locals actually shop at. It's the best place in town for a second breakfast: a Leberkäse roll, a slice of farm bread with butter and chives, local cheeses, smoked bacon and Krapfen, jam doughnuts, with a coffee from a stand.

Archbishop Wolf Dietrich built a palace here in 1606 for Salome Alt, the woman he lived with openly for over 20 years, and the mother of his 15 children. His successor renamed it Mirabell and pretended she had never existed. Today the palace is the town hall, and its baroque Marble Hall, where the young Mozart played for the archbishop, is a famous place to get married.

The gardens are free and open all day: formal beds of flowers lined up towards the fortress in the most famous view in Salzburg, the Pegasus fountain, the dwarf garden full of stone dwarves, and the steps where Maria and the children sing Do-Re-Mi. In the old Orangery, a new museum opened in 2026 shows Johann Michael Sattler's panorama of Salzburg, painted in 1829 on a 26 m canvas, the city as it was.

On Makartplatz, the Mozart Residence is the bigger flat the family moved into in 1773, when the Birthplace got too small. Mozart wrote much of his early music here before he left for Vienna in 1781, and his father Leopold lived here until he died in 1787. A bomb destroyed half of the house in 1944, and it was rebuilt and reopened only in 1996. The audio guide and the family's own instruments make it the better museum of the two, if a less atmospheric one.

Walk up Linzergasse, the right bank's old main street, quieter than Getreidegasse and with better cafés. Halfway up, through a gate on the left, is St. Sebastian's Cemetery, an arcaded Renaissance graveyard with Wolf Dietrich's own mausoleum in the middle, tiled inside like a jewel box. Mozart's father Leopold and his widow Constanze are buried here.

Back down the street, Steingasse is a narrow medieval lane along the bottom of the Kapuzinerberg. At number 9 Joseph Mohr was born in 1792, the young priest who wrote the words of Silent Night in 1816.

From Linzergasse, a steep stairway and a path climb up through the woods of the Kapuzinerberg, past the stations of the cross and the Capuchin monastery, to a viewpoint where the whole old town and the fortress line up in front of you. Locals think this is the best view of Salzburg, and they're right.

The writer Stefan Zweig lived on the hill, in the Paschinger Schlössl, from 1919 to 1934, when he was one of the most read authors in the world, before the rise of the Nazis drove him into exile and, eventually, to suicide in Brazil. A small memorial stands near the house. Higher up, the Franziskischlössl is a little fortress-turned-inn with a garden.

Cross back to the left bank, and from Gstättengasse take the Mönchsberg lift, which has been carrying people up inside the rock since 1890, to the top of the cliff that walls in the old town. The glass terrace of the Museum der Moderne, the city's modern art museum, has the classic view across the domes to the fortress; the museum closes at 6pm.

Then walk the path along the top of the Mönchsberg, through woods and past old fortifications and villas, north towards Mülln. It takes about 20 minutes, and you come down a stairway right next to the beer hall.

Augustiner Bräu has been brewing in the monastery at Mülln since 1621, and it's the biggest beer hall in Austria: vaulted halls for about 900 people, and a beer garden for over a thousand under chestnut trees. The ritual is the best part. Take a stone mug from the rack, rinse it at the fountain, pay at the till and hand it to the man at the wooden barrel, who fills it straight from the cask.

For food, walk along the corridor of stalls selling roast chicken, pretzels, sausages, radishes and Obatzda, a spicy cheese spread, and take it back to your table. You can even bring your own picnic. On a weeknight, the long tables fill with students, pensioners and families together, and it's the most Salzburg evening there is.

The village has around 750 inhabitants and more than a million visitors a year, and a Chinese developer even built a full-size copy of it in Guangdong in 2012. Most visitors come for an hour and the same photo. Stay a bit longer and walk the lanes away from the main square, up to the Catholic church and its charnel house, the Beinhaus, where more than 600 painted skulls are kept. With so little room for a graveyard, bones were dug up after a few years, and families painted the skulls with flowers, names and dates.

Hallstatt is so old that an entire era of European prehistory, the Hallstatt culture of the early Iron Age, is named after the finds in its graves. Be a good guest: people live here, so don't fly drones, walk into private gardens or photograph through windows.

Salt is why Hallstatt exists. People have mined it inside the mountain above the village for about 7,000 years, which makes this the oldest salt mine in the world. A funicular takes you up to the Skywalk, a platform hanging 360 m above the rooftops with the whole lake below, and then the tour goes inside the mountain, where you ride down two long wooden miners' slides and hear the story of the "man in salt", a prehistoric miner whose body was found preserved in the salt in 1734 and buried again.

Leave the way people arrived for most of Hallstatt's history, before the road was cut through the cliffs in 1890: by boat. The little ferry, the Stefanie, crosses the deep, dark-green Hallstätter See in about ten minutes to the railway station on the far shore, and the view back at the village, with houses stacked up the mountainside and the church spire at the water's edge, is the one on all the postcards. From the station, a train takes about 25 minutes to Bad Ischl.

The spa town of Bad Ischl was where the Habsburg court spent its summers. In 1853 the 23-year-old Franz Joseph came here to get engaged to his cousin Helene and fell for her younger sister instead, a 15-year-old called Elisabeth, Sisi. Their wedding present from his mother was the Kaiservilla, which he used every summer for 60 years.

It was also here, in the study you can see on the guided tour, that he signed the declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, the start of the First World War. The villa is still owned by his descendants.

Before the bus back to Salzburg, go for coffee and cake at Zauner, the confectioner that has supplied the court and everyone else since 1832. The house specialty is the Zaunerstollen, a bar of wafers and hazelnut nougat coated in chocolate, but the cake counter is long and you can't really go wrong. Sit at the café on the Esplanade by the river if the weather's good.

Archbishop Markus Sittikus built Hellbrunn in 1612-1615 as a summer palace for a single day out, never to sleep in, and filled its garden with a sense of humor. The trick fountains are the reason to come: on the guided tour, water shoots out of stone stools, antlers, statues' mouths and the paths under your feet, usually when you're least expecting it. In the middle sits the archbishop's own stone dinner table, with a jet of water hidden under every seat except his.

There's a mechanical theater from the 1750s with 142 moving figures, all powered by water, and in the park, the Stone Theater, a quarry where an opera is said to have been performed in 1617, one of the first north of the Alps.

In the park stands the glass gazebo from the film, where Liesl sings "Sixteen Going on Seventeen", moved here from the grounds of Schloss Leopoldskron, the lakeside palace used for the family's house. In September 2026, the Salzburg Museum opened the first official Sound of Music museum next to it, in an old gamekeeper's house: hundreds of objects from the film, the Broadway and stage versions and the real von Trapps.

It's the right place to make peace with the film. Most Austrians have never seen it, and its interiors were shot in Hollywood, but it's brought millions of people to Salzburg, and the museum is honest about where the film and the family's story part ways. Fans can rent a bike and ride the Hellbrunner Allee back towards town, past the yellow Frohnburg, which played the front of the von Trapp house.

From Hellbrunn, bus 25 continues to St. Leonhard and the Untersberg cable car, which climbs to 1,776 m in under ten minutes. From the top station, the Geiereck, a short path leads to a summit cross with a view over Salzburg, the lakes and the Bavarian Alps, with Berchtesgaden, where you'll go tomorrow, right below you.

The Untersberg is full of legends: Charlemagne, or in some versions Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, is said to sleep inside the mountain, waiting to wake when he's needed. There's a hut at the top for a drink in the sun, and paths for longer walks if you have good shoes.

Back in town, look for a queue at a tiny hole in the wall in the passage at Getreidegasse 33. The Balkan Grill sells just one thing, the Bosna, which a Bulgarian, Zanko Todoroff, first made in 1949 at a stand by the Augustiner: two grilled sausages in a long toasted roll with onions, parsley, mustard and a secret curry spice mix. You choose how spicy, and it's Salzburg's real street food.

End the day with Mozart. From May to August and in December, the Salzburg Marionette Theatre, which has performed operas with puppets since 1913, plays most evenings, and it's much better than it sounds. Wooden marionettes on strings act out The Magic Flute or The Sound of Music to recordings of great performances, and after a few minutes you forget there are strings. It's charming for adults as much as for children.

The rest of the year, look for a chamber concert in the Marble Hall of Mirabell Palace or in the fortress, where small ensembles play Mozart most evenings, or a concert at the Mozarteum, the music university and concert hall on Schwarzstrasse.

The Königssee is a long, narrow lake of very clear, very cold water between almost vertical mountain walls, and only electric and rowing boats are allowed on it, which keeps it quiet. Halfway across, the boatman stops in front of a cliff and plays a few notes on a flugelhorn, and the echo comes back off the rock walls, once, twice, several times.

The boat stops at St. Bartholomä, a little pilgrimage church with red onion domes on a green spit of land under the Watzmann's east face, a 1,800 m wall that's one of the highest in the Alps. In summer you can go on to Salet and walk ten minutes to the Obersee, an even smaller lake further in.

Next to the church, the old fishery smokes Saibling, Arctic char from the lake, over a hardwood fire, and sells it on a plate with bread and butter, or wrapped to take away. It's open from mid-April to the end of October. Have it at a wooden table by the water, with a glass of Bavarian beer, before the boat back.

Above Berchtesgaden, the Obersalzberg was Hitler's mountain home from the 1920s, and in the 1930s the Nazis turned it into a second seat of power, with his Berghof, houses for Göring and Bormann, barracks and bunkers. Most of it was bombed in April 1945 and later torn down. The Obersalzberg Documentation Center, in a new building since 2023, tells that history soberly, and you can walk into part of the old bunker system.

The Eagle's Nest, the Kehlsteinhaus, on the summit above, is reached by special buses from here in summer only.

Take the bus back to Salzburg for a last dinner in one of the old inns. Gablerbräu on Linzergasse, recorded as a brewhouse as early as 1408, serves goulash, schnitzel and Kaiserschmarrn, and the Bärenwirt, an inn since 1663 near the Augustiner in Mülln, is famous for its Backhendl, Austrian fried chicken.

Or book a table at the Mozart Dinner Concert in the baroque hall of St. Peter Stiftskulinarium, where singers and a string ensemble in period costume perform arias from Mozart's operas between the courses of a dinner based on 18th-century recipes. It's aimed at visitors, and it's fun anyway.