Visiting Salzburg’s key Sound of Music filming locations

The Sound of Music is still hugely popular in Salzburg, 60 years after the film was released.

5 top Salzburg Sound of Music sites

• The Mozart Bridge on the Salzach River – where the Trapp children skip.
• The Leopoldskron Palace lake – where Maria and the children fall out of the rowboat.
• St Michael’s Church in Mondsee – where Maria gets married.
• The Festival Halls at the bottom of Mönchsberg, where the family perform before escaping.
• Untersberg – the mountain the family supposedly escaped over.

To book a tour of Salzburg’s Sound of Music sites, head here.

For a story about doing the tour and discovering the filming secrets, read on.

Walking across Mönchsberg

The walk across Salzburg’s Mönchsberg hill is an exercise in blissful escape. While the Old Town heaves with visitors, few people take on the kilometre or so’s stroll through the woodland between the centuries-old fortress and the very much 21^st century Museum Der Moderne.

The walk is also, it would seem, the only place in the entire city where it’s possible to avoid a certain film. This lasts right until the terrace outside the Museum Der Moderne, with the view looking down at the Old Town.

The scene is instantly recognisable. The brain registers it without the faintest hesitation. This time, it’s Do-Re-Mi.

Sites from Sound of Music scenes

This is something that happens time and time again in Salzburg. In Residenzplatz, one of the network of grand squares deliberately designed to show off Salzburg’s baroque splendour, it’s the bit from near the start of I Have Confidence. At the Mozart Bridge over the Salzach river, it’s the where the children merrily skip on their way to the picnic dressed in frankly awful outfits made from curtains. The Festival Halls built into the rock at the bottom of Mönchsberg are where the family wows the public before dashing off on their daring escape.

It’s testament to the Sound Of Music’s longevity and place in the collective consciousness that there’s no head-scratching or mental puzzling over what was shot where. The film may be 60 years old in 2025, but the Salzburg it shows is still imprinted in the memory.

Why Salzburg was the star of the Sound of Music

Few cities are as closely associated with one film as Salzburg is with the Sound of Music. When it was filmed, director Robert Wise calculatingly gave the city a role as prominent as Julie Andrews’. After release in 1965, the movie’s success sparked a tourism boom in Salzburg that has continued unabated ever since. Some of the stats given out by the city’s tourism office are astounding. For 40 per cent of visitors to the city, the Sound of Music is cited as a major reason for visiting. Applied to the American market, three-quarters of respondents said the Sound of Music was the main spur for booking a trip there.

Salzburg’s musical past: Mozart

The irony is that Salzburg didn’t exactly need the injection of visitors. It has long been a city that has attracted and cultivated tourism – and in its most famous son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it already had a musical hook to lure people in with.

Mozart is usually regarded as Austrian, but that’s technically incorrect: He was a Salzburger. During his lifetime, Salzburg was a distinctly odd ecclesiastical city state, ruled by autocratic Prince-Archbishops. It remained that way for hundreds of years, fuelled by the riches from the nearby salt mines, before Napoleon came along at the beginning of the 19^th century and knocked the system down.

Salzburg then joined with neighbouring Austria and it wasn’t long before it was being packaged up as a tourism honeypot. The masterpiece Baroque buildings that the Prince-Archbishops had built and the looming mountains nearby made it ripe for adding to the European Grand Tour circuit.

So Robert Wise and co didn’t have to fiddle with an awful lot to make Salzburg look good on the big screen. But that isn’t to say he didn’t use the occasional sleight of hand.

The Sound of Music at Leopoldskron Palace

One of the staple stops on the bus tours that hundreds of Trapp-loving fans go on every day is Leopoldskron Palace, a couple of kilometres outside the city centre. Now used for hosting seminars, this was one of the two buildings that doubled as the Trapp family home.

The palace itself is never properly seen in the film, but the lake behind it – with the distinctively-peaked Untersberg mountain on the other side – is very prominent. It’s where Maria and the children fall in while standing up on a boat and waving to Captain Georg Von Trapp.

The incident on the Leopoldskron Lake

Panorama Tours guide Sharon explains that shooting of the sequence didn’t quite go to plan, however. “The girl who played Gretl couldn’t swim,” she says. “So it was agreed that Julie Andrews would stay close to her and keep hold of her when the boat capsized.

“Unfortunately, Julie fell backwards and all the kids fell forwards. The lake’s only about two metres deep, but a crew member had to dive in to save Gretl.”

Why Salzburg’s Sound of Music tours are so much fun

It’s little titbits such as this that make the Sound Of Music tours fascinating even for the people who are massively ambivalent towards the film. There are a fair few of them on the bus, dragged along by near-obsessive partners.

Indeed, it’s these obsessives that play a major part in making the tours absurdly entertaining. They merrily bellow along with the songs as they’re played on the bus, yodel with gusto as The Lonely Goatherd blares out and some even dress up in traditional Austrian folk costumes to have their photos taken by a very famous gazebo at Hellbrunn Palace.

St Michael’s Church in Mondsee

The journey continues into the Austrian lake district, which featured in many of indulgent aerial opening scenes, until the bus reaches Mondsee. It’s a pretty little town where cafés serve up endless amounts of strudel. “Don’t ask for crisp apple strudel, though,” says Sharon. “It’s not supposed to be crisp, despite what Maria sings in My Favourite Things. Also, asking for schnitzel with noodles marks you out as a tourist – it’s supposed to be eaten with potatoes.”

The twin-towered St Michael’s Church in Mondsee doesn’t ring any bells from the outside, but wander in, and the heavily OTT black and gold ornamentation is very familiar. This was where Maria and the captain got married in the film – the nuns wouldn’t allow the crew to film inside the Nonnberg Abbey where the wedding supposedly took place.

What really happened to the Trapp family

In real life, the wedding happened a good few years before the Trapps made their escape. Maria had already had two more children with Georg, and a third was on the way. It wasn’t the only bit of dramatic licence either. The real world escape was far less dramatic.

On the way back to the city, Untersberg comes into view again. In the film, this was the mountain the family escaped over after leaving the Festival Hall. The sheer ludicrousness of this becomes apparent once you discover that two thirds of Untersberg is in Germany, and on the other side is Eagle’s Nest, the secondary Nazi HQ where the high command spent considerable chunks of the year. The movieland escapees were running towards the very people they were trying to get away from.

In reality, the Trapps departed by train. Georg was born in Zadar, now in Croatia but under Italian control at the time. He was quite entitled to claim Italian citizenship – leaving wasn’t such a tense drama.

More Austria travel

Other Austria travel articles on Planet Whitley include:

• Can you walk from Salzburg Airport to the city centre?
• Is the Bergisel ski jump in Innsbruck worth the entry fee?
• Learning about incredible forgeries at Vienna’s Museum of Art Fakes.
• Why the Naschmarkt may be your favourite bit of Vienna.
• How to get from Linz to Cesky Krumlov in Czechia.