Salzburg & Upper Austria

Salt made this region. Miners were cutting it from the mountain above Hallstatt in the Bronze Age — a wooden staircase found in the workings dates from 1344 BC — and the cemetery excavated there from 1846 by the mine manager Johann Georg Ramsauer, more than a thousand graves, gave its name to the Hallstatt culture of early Iron Age Europe. Rome held the Danube from Lentia, now Linz, and Lauriacum, now Enns, where St. Florian was drowned in 304, and made Iuvavum, on the Salzach, a town.

About 696 the missionary Rupert refounded Iuvavum as Salzburg, establishing St. Peter's Abbey and, around 715, the Nonnberg convent, both still in being. It became an archbishopric in 798. Its archbishops began Hohensalzburg in 1077, ruled as princes of the Empire from 1213 on the profits of Hallein's salt, and between 1587 and 1653 Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, Markus Sittikus and Paris Lodron rebuilt the city on Italian late-Renaissance and Baroque lines. In 1731 Archbishop Firmian expelled more than 20,000 Protestants. Mozart, born in the Getreidegasse in 1756, left the archbishop's service for Vienna in 1781; the state was secularised in 1803 and became Austrian for good in 1816. Upper Austria, the Habsburgs' land "above the Enns", rose in a peasants' war in 1626 and gained the Innviertel from Bavaria in 1779, while the Salzkammergut remained a crown salt estate run by the salt office at Gmunden.

Franz Joseph spent more than sixty summers at Bad Ischl and signed the declaration of war on Serbia there on 28 July 1914. Hitler was born at Braunau am Inn in 1889 and schooled in Linz, and under Nazi rule the city gained the steelworks that became voestalpine; 20 kilometres east, some 190,000 people were imprisoned at Mauthausen and its subcamps from 1938, and at least 90,000 died. Until 1955 the Danube at Linz divided the Soviet and American zones. Linz in 2009 and Bad Ischl in 2024 were European Capitals of Culture.

Salzburg lives by a calendar of festivals: Mozart Week around the composer's birthday in late January, the Easter Festival founded in 1967 by Herbert von Karajan, a native of the city, and the summer Festival, at which Hofmannsthal's Jedermann has been played in front of the cathedral since 1920. The prince-archbishops left a thoroughly Catholic city of domes and cemeteries, and the region's best-known export after Mozart is a carol: Silent Night, first sung at Oberndorf on the Salzach on Christmas Eve 1818.

Custom is strongest between Advent and Epiphany. Krampus runs fill the towns in early December; on 5 January the Glöckler of Ebensee and the Traunsee villages run through the dark in white, carrying great lit paper lanterns on their heads; and on 6 January the masked Perchten of the Pongau parade through one of its towns. At Corpus Christi the processions at Hallstatt and Traunkirchen take to the lake in boats, and in late September and early October the cattle come down garlanded from the high pastures. Hallstatt, short of cemetery space, long dug up its dead after ten to thirty years and painted the skulls with names, dates and flowers; some 600 of them line the charnel house.

Upper Austrians speak a broad Bavarian dialect, and their countryside is marked by the Vierkanter, the great four-square farmsteads of the eastern Traunviertel. Linz has spent more than four decades exchanging the image of a steel town for that of a laboratory, with the Ars Electronica festival of digital art each September, the Klangwolke, an open-air concert of music and light on the Danube, and July's street-art Pflasterspektakel. Anton Bruckner, born at Ansfelden in 1824, lies beneath the organ he played at St. Florian.

Upper Austria has about 1.5 million people and Salzburg state some 570,000. Linz, with 214,000, is Austria's third city, followed in its own state by Wels, with 65,000, and Steyr; Salzburg has 158,000, Hallein about 21,000 and Bad Ischl 14,000. Hallstatt has fewer than 750 residents and has been estimated to receive 10,000 to nearly 30,000 visitors a day; in 2023 villagers blocked the road tunnel in protest, and coach arrivals are now rationed by booked time slots.

Upper Austria is the country's leading industrial region, with about a quarter of its exports: voestalpine's steelworks at Linz, where the basic-oxygen process now used worldwide was first put into industrial use in 1952, the chemical park beside it, BMW's engine plant at Steyr, KTM motorcycles at Mattighofen, the fibre-maker Lenzing and hundreds of engineering suppliers. Salzburg lives from tourism, trade and company headquarters — Red Bull at Fuschl am See, Porsche Holding, Spar — and winter skiing in the Pongau and Pinzgau matters as much as the summer city. Salt is still produced, from brine piped to Ebensee.

The day starts early, and shops close by early evening and on Sundays. Markets matter — Linz's Südbahnhofmarkt is the city's largest — and so do beer gardens, above all the Augustiner Bräustübl at Mülln in Salzburg, where monastery beer has been brewed since 1621. In summer the lakes' public lidos fill after work; in winter a day's skiing is an hour from either city. The issues are house prices in Salzburg, second homes around the lakes and holiday traffic on the Tauern motorway.

Salzburg's signature is a dessert: Salzburger Nockerl, a soufflé of egg white and sugar baked in three golden peaks, said to stand for the hills around the city, and always served fresh and warm. The Mozartkugel — pistachio marzipan and nougat in dark chocolate — was invented by the confectioner Paul Fürst in 1890, and his descendants still make them by hand, while most others are made industrially. The street snack is the Bosna, sausages in a toasted roll with onions and curry powder, sold from a small shop in a passage off the Getreidegasse since 1950. In the Pinzgau the dish is Kasnocken, a variant of Käsespätzle: small dumplings layered with grated hard cheese and topped with fried onions.

Upper Austria is dumpling country, from Speckknödel with bacon to Grammelknödel filled with crackling, and the traditional Sunday dish is the Bratl, roast pork. The Linzer Torte, a lattice-topped nut pastry filled with redcurrant jam, is recorded in a recipe of 1653 and has been called the oldest cake named after a place. The drink of the farms is Most, a sharp cider of pears and apples; the Mühlviertel grows hops, and Freistadt's brewery has belonged jointly to the householders of the old town since 1777.

The lakes supply Reinanke, a whitefish, and Saibling, char, smoked, fried or grilled on a stick as Steckerlfisch. Bad Ischl's Konditorei Zauner, the emperor's confectioner, makes the Zaunerstollen of nougat and crushed wafers. Beer is the everyday drink in both states: Stiegl has brewed in Salzburg since 1492, Trumer makes its Pils at Obertrum, and Zipf and Eggenberg theirs in Upper Austria.

Salzburg's old town, a World Heritage Site since 1996, is squeezed between the Salzach and the Mönchsberg cliff beneath Hohensalzburg, one of the largest medieval castles in Europe. Below it are the cathedral and the archbishops' Residenz, St. Peter's Abbey with its cemetery and rock-cut catacombs, the Getreidegasse with Mozart's birthplace, and the festival halls; across the river lie Mirabell Palace and its gardens. Hellbrunn Palace keeps the trick fountains Markus Sittikus installed in the 1610s to soak his guests, and a cable car climbs the Untersberg.

The Salzkammergut lakes begin half an hour east. On the Wolfgangsee, St. Wolfgang has Michael Pacher's winged altarpiece of 1481 and the cog railway up the Schafberg; Mondsee has the abbey church of the film wedding; the Attersee, the largest lake wholly in Austria, was Klimt's summer subject; and the Traunsee, the deepest at 191 metres, has Gmunden's island castle of Ort. Bad Ischl, at the centre, keeps the Kaiservilla, Lehár's villa and the Zauner café. Hallstatt, reached by road only since 1890, has its market square, its charnel house and the salt mine, with a funicular and viewing platform, above the roofs; across the lake at Obertraun cable cars reach the Dachstein's Giant Ice Cave and the Five Fingers platform, and the Gosau lakes lie beneath the Dachstein.

Linz has one of Europe's largest enclosed squares, the Ars Electronica museum and the glass Lentos gallery facing each other across the Danube, the vast neo-Gothic New Cathedral and the tram of 1898 up the Pöstlingberg. Near it are St. Florian's Baroque abbey, the Mauthausen memorial, the old iron town of Steyr and, upstream, the Schlögen loop, where the Danube doubles back on itself; the Kalkalpen National Park protects Austria's largest karst region and beech forests on UNESCO's World Heritage list. South of Salzburg, Werfen has Hohenwerfen castle and the Eisriesenwelt, and beyond lie Bad Gastein's grand hotels around its waterfall, Zell am See and the Kitzsteinhorn glacier, and the 380-metre Krimml Waterfalls, Austria's highest, in Hohe Tauern National Park.