Salzburg Views

[selenak]

I had a really busy month, but there was one day I spent in Salzburg, which is easily reachable by train from Munich, where I live, and I had the most magnificent weather. And that city does look like a baroque cake. Which is why you get a Salzburg pic spam before my nativity pic spam during the holidays.







Because of the lovely weather, I mostly walked, nearly 24 kilometres all in all, on both sides of the river to get the most shamelessly picturesque photos of Salzburg. See, all the other times I was there, it was during the festival, and I did not have the comfortable shoes and jeans to walk around and up and down mountains. Like the Mönchsberg, from where you get this panorama:





If you're not good on foot, it's possible to take the elevator of the Museum of Modern Art to reach the same panoramic level and enjoy this view:






If you're averse to any kind of hill or mountain (though in which case, why are you in Salzburg), there's a really nice view on the castle from the Mirabell palace gardens:






If you're up for cllimbing, I've got stairs leading you up the Kapuzinerberg (on the opposite side of the river). On that part of town, there's also a breathtakingly detailed and lovely nativity scene created by a single woman, but you will see those pics in a few days in my annual Christmas post, which is why they're not here. Anyway: Salzburg and its castle as seen from the Kapuzinerberg:







Back to the other side to the Mönchsberg.




From where you can see the most important churches of the city - the Cathedral, St. Francis and St. Peter - together.





You can also walk from the Mönchsberg to the Richterhöhe, which offers this view of the castle:



Said castle proudly declares itself never to have been captured by an enemy.




Next, you walk from the Richterhöhe to the castle itself. And climb the highest tower, which is when you get this view of Salzburg and its surrounding hinterland:




The keep:





Now, the most famous person ever to be born in Salzburg had nothing whatsoever to do with the castle, and could not wait to get away from the guy nominally in charge of it, i.e. the Prince Bishop. Say hello to Mozart's birthplace:



If you walk down from the castle to the old city centre, you arrive at the square in front of the Cathedral which offers yet another neat view of the castle:




The Cathedral in question from above:



On two sides of the Cathedral, there are of course big Christmas Markets on this time of the year.









Inside you get typical Austrian baroque:




Also where Mozart was baptised:



Their very own nativity scene is charming as well.




Near the Cathedral is St. Peter, where they have a small but neat Christmas market:







And St. Francis, where they promised me a baroque navitity but did not deliver.




Much as I enjoyed the view admiring and mountain climbing on both sides of the river, it was eventually time to depart for Munich. On the way back I caught my breath once more:






You may have noticed that I did not mention "The Sound of Music" as a reason (for me) to visit Salzburg. This is because in Germany and Austria, "The Sound of Music" is not a thing. YouTuber Feli in this video entertainingly explains why, and her summary in the introduction about the way she reacted when first coming to the US and everyone bringing up "The Sound of Music" to her sounded hilariouly familiar - this is exactly what happened to me and how I reacted as well:

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[sovay]

I had a really busy month, but there was one day I spent in Salzburg, which is easily reachable by train from Munich, where I live, and I had the most magnificent weather.

I am glad the weather as well as the city provided you with such excellent views.

In elementary school, when we still thought my father's side of the family was Austrian, I remember incorporating Salzburg into a class assignment about countries of familial origin. (I had already done Russia, since the Pale of Settlement was not really an option, for a previous, similarly themed project. I have no idea why my elementary school had us do this sort of thing more than once.)

[selenak]

Salzburg as a symbol for Austria, or Salzburg as a city you specifically thought your father's family might be from?

[sovay]

Salzburg as a symbol for Austria, or Salzburg as a city you specifically thought your father's family might be from?

More in the sense of the former, since it provided me with reason to write about Mozart and include a picture from the inside of a salt mine. My father's father had styled himself in descent from the aristocratic Austrian Taaffes and while there was some skepticism about the directness of that claim even in my childhood, the Austrian part was assumed to be accurate until my father's youngest brother got seriously into genealogy: the notion of any meaningful relation to Eduard Franz Joseph Graf Taaffe broke up while I was in college and by the time I left grad school, it was apparent that the name had come down through nineteenth-century Irish immigrants instead. (Which has since turned out to be part of a ludicrous complex of Americana.) My father's father had been born in San Francisco before 1906 and it served him well throughout his entire life as he revised his various versions of it. I reserve the right to be entertained by the Titles Deprivation Act 1917 and to visit the piece of taaffeite at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

[trobadora]

What a gorgeous day, and what gorgeous pics!

I haven't been to Salzburg in ages; I really should go back one of these days.

[selenak]

I hadn't been there since almost a decade, either, despite the relative proximity. Totally worth it.

[lightofdaye]

Gorgeous photos, lovely landscapes and well framed.

I can see why you lead with the top one, it's simply beautiful.

[selenak]

Thank you. :)

[reverancepavane]

Lovely. Thank you for sharing.

[selenak]

You're welcome!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Lucky you! Thank you for sharing, and you remind me that I need to get back to posting my own trip photos in January.

[selenak]

You're very welcome!

[itsnotmymind]

Beautiful photos!

[kathyh]

Lovely photos. I have been to Salzburg for the day but it was over 30 degrees so we didn’t do more walking than we needed to!

[shadowkat]

Lovely pics, thanks for sharing. I always enjoy your photos and am deeply grateful for them. I've been considering taking a river cruise through that area, and those pictures do sell the idea. I've only been to Berlin (West and East) and in 1981 or thereabouts. Have family members from Germany on my mother's side. Northern Germany. Although most of them are long gone now.

Interesting about the Sound of Music. I forgot the musical and film took place in Salzburg (which spellcheck is informing me that I've misspelled. I haven't. It wants Sandburg for some reason.) Was it actually filmed there? (Checked, yes it was - in the 1960s. Must have been annoying to the residents. I live in NYC, I know how annoying film crews can be.) I'm not surprised it got a lot of things wrong - 98% of the information that is shown on American television and film about NYC and other areas is completely wrong. (It doesn't snow here as much as the media thinks it does. We've barely had snow in years.) No, apartments are not as big as the apartments on Friends. And the Upper West Side doesn't look anything like it did in West Side Story (in the 60s or otherwise). Our media tends to "embellish".

The Sound of Music isn't as popular now in the US as it was in the mid to late 20th Century. In the 1970s to roughly the 1990s, the Sound of Music was shown annually at Christmas, and sometimes at Easter. The films we saw every year at either Christmas or Easter were: The Sound of Music and the Wizard of Oz (usually Christmas), and The Ten Commandments and Gone with the Wind (Easter). As a result, I've seen all of them about fifteen times. I can't watch them any more. We even had the soundtrack to The Sound of Music when I was a kid in the 1970s. It really wasn't until the 1990s, that I got the true story behind the musical, and the Von Trapps. But most millenials (I'm Gen X) in the US don't really know the Sound of Music all that well, or have seen it. It really fell out of favor and stopped being shown somewhere around 2010, or when we switched to streaming. Same with Gone with the Wind. Also, these films don't necessarily date well. Gone with the Wind definitely didn't date well - and was always problematic. Sound of Music holds up better - as long as you don't know the real story and the topography. (Although the hike over the mountains always struck me as questionable.) I'm not even sure they show either the Sound of Music or Gone with the Wind in the US any longer, except on Disney +?

[aella_irene]

My uncle went to Salzburg twice with his mother, once when it was the City of Mozart, and once when it was the City of The Sound of Music, and apparently she was deeply unimpressed with the second visit.

[lokifan]

I had no idea The Sound of Music was such a flop in Austria and Germany!

[selenak]

Of all the reasons Feli gave, I do suspect the fact that there already had been two successful German Trapp movies just a few years earlier which were a success meant this was, for starters, bad timing. Cinema goers must have been Trapped out, and besides the German movies had used actual songs sung by the Trapp Family, not completely new songs from a very USian musical. Nothing against the soundtrack as such, but just imagine you are going into the cinema to watch a film about, say, Johnny Cash, and the music sounds like it's composed by a current day K-Pop band. And the initial flopp in the cinema meant there was no eagerness to show it on tv, and that in turn meant it never became a household word.

....and that's before we get into the content of "Schnitzel with Noodles" (the horror, the absolute horror!) , everyone trying to cross the Alps with no luggage and going into the wrong direction, or the idea of Austria pre-Anschluss as some kind of idyllic paradise when in fact the term "Austrofascism" is more applicable....

If you want to read a very funny Austrian take-down of The Sound of Music (in English, don't worry), I reccommend this one.

[msilverstar]

Lovely photos!

Your stamina is extremely impressive, I've been walking every day but not uphill. You are inspiring me!

[selenak]

I don't walk uphill every day, either, but Salzburg in the sunshine was just inspiring this way. :)

[cahn]

Just gorgeous! Those panoramic views of the city are just wow!!

Heh, though I associated Salzburg with Mozart immediately, I had actually forgotten Sound of Music took place in Salzburg, and there was a time as a kid when we were watching it probably on a yearly basis. I think it's that place information imprints on me more in print (where I'd read about Mozart) than in movies. (I'm trying to think of any movie where I actually know where it took place, more than the country, without having external information about it (like having been to the location before and recognizing it), and drawing a blank...)

[watervole]

I love how the buildings that are painted all use pastel colours. It's very harmonious.