Hellbrunn Palace

Where it sits. Hellbrunn stands about four kilometres south of Salzburg's old town, on the flat floor of the Salzach valley where the meadows run up against the first wooded rise below the Untersberg. The approach is part of the design. The Hellbrunner Allee, laid out in the early seventeenth century and planted with lime, ash and chestnut, runs dead straight for roughly four kilometres from Freisaal on the city edge to the palace gates, passing a row of canons' manor houses built along it — Frohnburg, Emsburg, Emslieb. It is one of the oldest surviving avenues of its type in central Europe and still the best way to arrive: twenty-five minutes on foot, ten by bicycle, with the grey limestone wall of the Untersberg filling the view ahead the whole way.

The story behind it. Prince-Archbishop Markus Sittikus von Hohenems commissioned Hellbrunn in 1613 and had it standing by 1615, a startling pace for a building of this size. His architect was Santino Solari, the Italian who was simultaneously rebuilding Salzburg Cathedral, and the result is one of the earliest complete Italian suburban villas north of the Alps — a low, ochre, three-winged block around a courtyard, with painted illusionistic architecture inside rather than carved stone. Sittikus never intended to sleep here. Hellbrunn was a Lustschloss, a day palace built for entertaining: the court came out from the Residenz for a long lunch and went home before dark, so the main block has no bedchambers and was built without heating. The name comes from the springs in the hill behind, whose constant pressure powers everything that makes the place peculiar.

The water games. The Wasserspiele are the reason Hellbrunn is not simply another archbishop's villa. Sittikus had his engineers thread spring water through the gardens under gravity alone — no pump has ever been needed — and used it to ambush his guests. In the Roman Theatre a stone table seats fifteen; jets hidden in the benches soak everyone except the host, whose seat is dry. The grottoes that follow contain a crown that rises and falls on a column of water, birdsong produced by air forced through pipes, and a mask with a rolling tongue and eyes. The set piece at the far end is the Mechanical Theatre, built around 1750 by the miner Lorenz Rosenegger: 256 figures representing a baroque town — sawyers, potters, dancers, an executioner — all driven by a single water wheel while an organ plays. Guided tours run in a fixed loop and getting wet is not optional.

On screen. The small white-framed glass pavilion in the park is the gazebo from The Sound of Music (1965), the one built for "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" and reused for "Something Good". It is a film prop rather than a garden building: Twentieth Century Fox had it erected in 1964 in the grounds of Schloss Leopoldskron, on the other side of the city, where the lakeside von Trapp scenes were shot. Leopoldskron's owners tired of visitors climbing the fences, and in 1991 the pavilion was moved here, where it now sits on a lawn near the palace's southern flank. What it is not is a filming location for the dance itself. The interior choreography — the leaping between benches — was shot on a soundstage in Los Angeles after Charmian Carr slipped through a glass panel during rehearsal and had to perform with a bandaged ankle. The gazebo is kept locked for exactly that reason; visitors attempting the same jumps caused injuries into the 2010s.

What you actually see today. The palace interior is shown as a walk-through of unfurnished state rooms whose value is the painted decoration: the Festsaal with its trompe-l'oeil colonnade opening onto invented landscapes, the octagonal music room, and the Chinese cabinets added in the eighteenth century. Outside, the formal garden survives in outline with its long water basin and the unicorn and Neptune sculptures. Up the slope stands the Monatsschlössl — the "Month Palace", supposedly thrown up in a single month of 1615 to surprise a guest — which now holds the Salzburg folklore museum. Higher again, cut into an old quarry, is the Steintheater, a natural rock amphitheatre used for open-air performances from 1617, among the earliest such stages north of the Alps. The Salzburg Zoo shares the same valley pocket and the deer park below the palace is free to walk.

Getting there and timing. City bus 25 runs from Salzburg's main station and Mirabellplatz to the Hellbrunn stop in about twenty minutes. Water games and palace tours operate from late March to early November, with evening torchlit tours in July and August; in winter only the park, the Monatsschlössl and the Christmas market are open. Mornings before ten are quiet; coach groups arrive from eleven, and the fountains are considerably more entertaining on a warm afternoon than on a cold spring morning.