Salzburg is a mid-sized city located in the North central part of Austria right next to the border of Germany. It's about a three hour drive from the city of Vienna and about an hour from the small town of Hallstatt where we visited previously. We stayed in Salzburg for two nights starting on day two of our vacation and used it as our base camp to see a little of the surrounding area.
We arrived in the late afternoon and after dropping our stuff off at the hotel, we took a self guided tour around the old town to see what it was all about.
It was early evening by that point so the sun was quite low in sky as you will see in some of my photos.
But we also walked around the next day a little in the morning and again in the evening so my pictures are from all different times of the day.
Anyway, none of that is important and I don't know why I'm even mentioning it. Let's talk about Salzburg the city.
I found Salzburg and the the old town especially to be very walkable. It was completely pedestrianized so we didn't have to worry about cars. It was also a fairly small and compact town so it didn't take too much walking to get around.
I found it to be very charming as well and it had a somewhat luxurious vibe about it.
It had that feeling that there was a lot of money in city. Maybe it was how clean and well preserved it was or maybe the giant golden orb in the center of town had something to do with it?
The luxury vibe was especially felt while walking down the Getreidegasse, a famous shopping street with all sorts of high end stores selling designer fashion, jewelry, artisinal gifts and more.
The street was long and connected to the other streets in the old town by these throughways, which were like covered passageways through the buildings.
My favorite part of the street though were the traditional style iron signs.
They were very ornate and each one was unique to the shop it represented.
They gave a lot of character to the street and really stood out as a cool feature of the city.
Even the Macdonalds sign was impressive to me.
There must have been some sort of concert or festival happening or about to happen when we were there, because there were some large bleachers and screen set up outside the church. We never found out what they were for though.
Speaking of churches, we check out some great Baroque style architecture at the Salzburg Cathedral.
It was an impressive building located in the center of the historic district.
It wasn't hard to see why the city was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Another fun fact is that the city was the birthplace of Mozart.
There is a statue of the famous composer located in the square right by the cathedral.
You can also stop by the location where he was born.
It's a big yellow building with his name written on it; you really can't miss it.
Another claim to fame for the city is that it was the location (or close to it) where the Sound of Music was filmed.
I didn't see anything in the city itself about the film but we took a tour the next day and our guide mentioned it to us on the bus.
Anytime I go anywhere I generally look to see if the place has any nice parks or public gardens near by.
In this case, Salzburg had a great one located at Mirabell Palace.
Behind the palace was a garden that was free to get in.
It was full of statues and fountains and of course an abundance of flower beds.
It was busy there but it was also large and open so it wasn't crowded at all, so that was nice.
One thing that we didn't do was go up to the Hohensalzburg Fortress.
We chose to do other things while in the city so it just wasn't something that we had time for.
Nonetheless the fortress looked pretty cool up on the hilltop overlooking the old town below.
We viewed it from a few different angles at different times of day, especially at night.
We walked up the "mountain" one night for dinner so we got to see both sides of the city (the first two photos at the begining of this post showcase both sides of city). For now I'll just show you a small church that we came across on our walk that night.
And with that I'm all out of photos of the city, so I think it's time that I wrap things up. Overall I'd say that Salzburg was one of my favorite spots in the country and certainly a highlight of our trip. In my opinion I'd say that it is a "must see" location in the country.