Salzburg Audioguides

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born at Getreidegasse 9 on January 27, 1756, in a yellow-painted house that you can visit today and that is now the most visited house museum in Austria. He spent his childhood and early career in Salzburg, chafing under the Archbishop Colloredo's patronage and leaving for Vienna at 25, never to return while alive. The city that ignored him in life has built an entire tourism economy around him in death, which Mozart might have found irritating and the Archbishop would have found unseemly.

Hohensalzburg Fortress, the medieval castle on the Festungsberg hill above the old town, has commanded this bend in the Salzach River since 1077, making it one of the largest and best-preserved medieval castles in Europe.

Below it, the baroque old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was shaped largely by the Prince-Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau in the late 16th century, who hired Italian architects to transform a medieval city into one of the finest baroque townscapes north of the Alps. The Residenz Palace, the Cathedral, and the Mirabell Palace with its gardens from 1606 all date from this period of systematic urbanization.