Salzburg takes its name directly from the salt trade, “Salz” meaning salt, that made the city genuinely wealthy for centuries, salt mined from the surrounding Alps was so valuable in medieval Europe that it was sometimes called “white gold,” and the Prince-Archbishops who ruled Salzburg used that wealth to build the elaborate Baroque architecture that still defines the city’s historic centre today. Hohensalzburg Fortress, looming above the old town, is one of the largest fully preserved medieval castles in Europe, built beginning in 1077 and expanded steadily over the following centuries as successive rulers reinforced their control over the lucrative salt routes below.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in Salzburg in 1756, though his relationship with his hometown was famously strained, he found the city’s conservative Prince-Archbishop court stifling and eventually left for Vienna, seeking greater creative and financial independence, a departure Salzburg has since more than made up for by building much of its modern identity and tourism economy directly around his legacy.
A City Sold Twice by the Same Film
Salzburg’s Baroque squares and surrounding mountains gained an entirely new layer of global fame as the filming location for The Sound of Music in 1965, and the film remains, somewhat ironically, considerably more popular with foreign visitors than with most Austrians, many of whom have never seen it, dedicated “Sound of Music” tours nonetheless draw substantial tourism revenue to sites throughout the city and surrounding Salzkammergut lake district. That contrast, a city genuinely defined by Mozart’s classical legacy internationally recognised largely through a mid-century Hollywood musical, remains one of Salzburg’s more curious tourism dynamics.
The city’s annual Salzburg Festival, running since 1920, remains one of the most prestigious classical music and theatre events in the world, drawing performers and audiences specifically because of, rather than despite, the same conservative musical tradition that once frustrated Mozart himself.
Painting Baroque Domes Beneath the Alps
Salzburg’s Baroque skyline against its surrounding Alpine peaks gives a watercolourist rich architectural detail and dramatic mountain scale to work with. We’ve captured that setting in our own Salzburg Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of Austria for a wall at home.
Built on salt and famous now for a composer who couldn’t wait to leave it, Salzburg remains a city whose greatest legacy was, in some sense, never entirely its own choice.