The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Salzburg

Salzburg—the city of Mozart and The Sound of Music—is alive with beautiful baroque architecture, craggy castles, concerts and musical performances galore, and that cozy welcoming feeling you can only get in these kinds of pint-sized Alpine cities

Salzburg is a musical city, birthplace of Mozart and original home of the real-life singing von Trapp family, who warbled their way out of clutches of the Nazis in The Sound of Music.

The church-filled old city is hemmed in on one side by the Salzach river and on the other by a curling set of cliffs and a glowering medieval fortress. You can do this pretty baroque burg in a day, but it takes two if you plan on doing on the Sound of Music tours.

Salzburg Sights

The city center seems more a series of interconnected squares than a grid of streets, giving the city a very cozy, homey feel.

The Domplatz square is anchored by Salzburg's lovely Cathedral, one of the finest Italianate buildings north of the Alps; Mozart was baptized here and once served as organist (www.kirchen.net/salzburger-dom).

Speaking of the young musical prodigy, one of the city's top sights is the Mozart Geburtshaus, or Mozart's birth house, (tel. 0662/844-313; www.mozarteum.at; daily; adm) at Getreidegasse 9. The third-floor apartment is just stuffed with musical mementos from letters and sheet music to portraits (the unfinished one by his brother is thought to be the truest to life of any Mozart likeness) and the varied instruments on which the young master honed his talents.

The hauntingly beautiful St. Peter's Cemetery is shoehorned up against, and in some parts dug into, the cliffs behind the south side of the cathedral at St. Peter Bezirk 1/2 (Tel. +43-(0)662-844-5760; www.erzabtei.at).

Nearby on Festungsgasse, a 19th-century Cable Car Untersburg (Tel. +43-(0)6246-72-477; www.untersbergbahn.at) takes you up the cliffside to Hohensalzburg Fortress (Tel. +43-(0)662/8424-3011; www.salzburg-burgen.at). The castle tour grants you access to the apartments, torture chambers, and arms museum of the largest completely preserved fortress in Central Europe. Built from the 11th to the 17th centuries, this was once the safe house of Salzburg's ruling archbishops.

The Sound of Music

A requisite Salzburg experience is the half-day Sound of Music tour —as cheesy as it sounds, but fun. For about $45, you get a quick once-over of the city and the buildings featured in the film, and then it's off to the terribly scenic wildflower-spotted hills, alive with the sound of singing tourists, running from the bus and twirling around, Julie Andrews–style.

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For more on Sound of Music associations and filming locations, visit the special section on the Salzburg Tourism site.

Eating & Sleeping in Salzburg

The thoroughly Austrian Krimpelstätter (tel. 0662/432-274, www.krimpelstaetter.at), at Müllner Haptstrasse 31, has been satisfying Salzburger appetites for 450 years with würstel and wild game dishes, washed down with tankards of beer.

The artsy boutique hotel Arthotel Blaue Gans, (tel. 0662/842-491; www.blauegans.at) at Getreidegasse 41-43, has been renting out small but comfortable rooms at reasonable rates (under $200 per double) for more than 650 years in an ancient building near Mozart's birthplace.

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Getting to Salzburg

Half-hourly trains from Vienna (3.5 hrs.) and 10 daily trains from Munich (1.5-2 hrs.) arrive at Hauptbahnhof, a 20-minute walk (or five-minute ride on bus 1, 5, 6, or 51) from the center of town.

Salzburg visitor information

There's a tourist information booth in the train station at track 2A.

The main office is in the town center at Mozartplatz 5 (tel. +43-(0)662/889-870, www.salzburg.info).