Hohenwerfen Fortress

Where it sits. Hohenwerfen stands on an isolated rock about 155 metres above the floor of the Salzach valley at Werfen, some forty kilometres south of Salzburg in the Pongau district. The valley narrows here to a defile between two enormous limestone ranges, the Tennengebirge to the east and the Hagengebirge and Hochkonig group to the west, and the castle sits exactly in the gap, which explains everything about it. Whoever held this rock controlled the road from Salzburg to the Alpine passes and the salt and metal traffic that used it. Because the crag is free-standing, the fortress is visible for kilometres in both directions and appears to float above the valley when morning mist fills the floor beneath it.

Nine hundred years of a working fortress. Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg had the first castle built between 1075 and 1078, during the Investiture Controversy, as one of a trio of strongholds securing his territory alongside Hohensalzburg and Petersberg at Friesach. It was extended repeatedly and given its present bastioned outline in the sixteenth century, after the peasant risings of 1525 and 1526 showed how exposed the archbishopric was. Over the centuries it served as a garrison, a hunting seat, a state prison and a training school for the Austrian gendarmerie; several archbishops locked up their own political opponents in it, and one, Adalbert III, was himself imprisoned here. A fire in 1931 destroyed much of the interior. The province of Salzburg now owns the site and has restored it as a visitor attraction.

On screen. Hohenwerfen has two entirely separate film identities, and they are regularly confused. In Where Eagles Dare (1968), directed by Brian G. Hutton from Alistair MacLean's script, with Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood leading a raid on a German headquarters, the castle plays the exterior of the Schloss Adler. Everything you see of the building from outside is Hohenwerfen; the interiors were built at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood, and the celebrated fight on the roof of a cable car was filmed on the Feuerkogel cableway above Ebensee in Upper Austria, because Hohenwerfen has no cable car of its own. Three years earlier the meadow below the castle had done service in a much gentler picture: the Do-Re-Mi montage in The Sound of Music includes the sequence shot on the Gschwandtanger, the open pasture on the valley floor at Werfen, with the fortress on its rock in the background.

What you actually see today. A steep path winds up through the woods from the car park in about twenty minutes, and a small inclined lift covers part of the climb for those who prefer it. Inside the walls the circuit takes in the courtyards, the chapel, the bell tower, the armoury and the vaulted dungeons, with an audio guide covering the fortress history and, inevitably, the torture chamber. The single feature that distinguishes Hohenwerfen from Austria's many other hilltop castles is the falconry. The provincial falconry centre is based here, with a historical museum of the craft and a large collection of eagles, vultures, falcons and owls, and flight demonstrations are staged twice a day in the open field below the walls, birds sweeping down the slope and out over the valley with the mountains behind them.

The valley around it. Werfen itself is a small market town with a painted main street, and it is the base for one of the great natural sites of the eastern Alps: the Eisriesenwelt, on the flank of the Tennengebirge above the village, is the largest ice cave system known anywhere, with more than forty kilometres of surveyed passage and a first kilometre lined with ice formations. Reaching it involves a road, a cable car and a walk, and it operates only from May to late October. Between the two, a day at Werfen gives a fortress in the morning and a glacier inside a mountain in the afternoon.

Getting there and timing. Trains on the Salzburg to Bischofshofen line stop at Werfen, about forty minutes from Salzburg, and the castle is a walk from the station through the town. Drivers use the A10 Tauern motorway. The site opens from around April to early November, with reduced days at the shoulders, and the falconry displays are the fixed points of the daily timetable, so it is worth checking the flight times before setting out. Cobbles, steps and steep ramps make the interior hard going for anyone with limited mobility, although the terraces give the best views without entering the deeper rooms.