Salzburg; Saturday, 19 April, 2014

Fortified with breakfast my first stop of the morning was to head up to the Fortress to take in the sights.

There is quite a lot to see up at the fortress with a number of exhibitions and museums and so by the time I had finished looking round it was already early afternoon. I descended back down into town on the funicular and made it over to the Salzburg Festival Halls just in time to take the daily guided tour round the theatre complex.

The festival halls are only actually used for seven weeks in the entire year, a week at Whitsun and then the main six week festival in July and August, during the rest of the time they lie idle, apart from a daily group of tourists wandering round. To some ways that helps to explain the eye watering prices that were quoted for seats at any of the performances during the festival.

The tour started in the relatively new (2006) Mozart house which has a large auditorium and an almost equally as large stage, which the tour takes you round into the back of. After the Mozart House you then move into the main space the Rock Theatre. Originally carved out of the sheer cliff face to act as a viewing space for the Spanish Riding School that was located in front of the cliffs, today it’s been turned into the dramatic backdrop for the main stage (on which a certain Von-Trapp family performed on shortly before deciding to take a permanent and very sudden vacation from Salzburg), and apparently adds something special to the acoustics of the space.

The tour ends in what is now the halls bar, but at the time of creation was the indoor riding hall.

After the tour I headed over to the Salzburg museum to have a look around there before a quick, and late, lunch in the Motzartplatz.

After lunch I wandered over to the Schloß Mirabell, built by the then Prince Archbishop Wolf-Dietrich for his lover Salome, with whom he fathered 15 children (not bad for a senior Catholic cleric…) The palace itself was already closed for the evening, but the stunning gardens were still open so I had a long wander around them before finding myself back by the riverside, slightly downstream from the centre of town and from where it was possible to get some excellent pictures of the old town and fortress.

I walked back alongside the river to the old town and had a dinner in the same bierkeller I’d been to on the first night before heading back to the hotel and a well-earned rest.