Nonnberg Abbey

Where it sits. Nonnberg Abbey occupies a rock shelf on the eastern shoulder of the Festungsberg, tucked directly beneath the walls of the Hohensalzburg fortress and looking out over the Nonntal quarter and the Salzach basin towards the Untersberg. It is close enough to the old town to be a ten-minute climb from Kaigasse up the Nonnbergstiege, a stepped lane that ends at the abbey gate, and far enough above it to be silent. The complex is walled, whitewashed and inward-facing, arranged around a cloister that the public never sees, with the church tower and the steep roofs visible from almost every viewpoint in the city.

The oldest convent north of the Alps. Saint Rupert of Salzburg founded the house in about the year 714 and installed his kinswoman Erentrudis as its first abbess; Benedictine nuns have lived here without interruption ever since, which makes Nonnberg the longest continuously occupied convent north of the Alps. The early medieval church burned in 1423, and what stands now is a late Gothic rebuilding carried out between 1464 and 1509, with a Romanesque west portal of about 1240 kept from the earlier structure. Under the nuns' choir, in a series of niches, survives a cycle of Romanesque wall paintings from around 1150, among the most important of their date in Austria. The high altar holds a carved winged altarpiece brought from Scheffau, made around 1515, and the church retains its net vaulting and its stained glass.

Maria and the abbey. Maria Augusta Kutschera entered Nonnberg as a novice in 1924, at the age of nineteen, and was sent out from here in 1926 to tutor one of the seven children of the widowed naval officer Georg von Trapp, whom she married the following year. The family's flight from Austria in 1938 was rather less dramatic than the version filmed: they left openly by train for Italy, rather than climbing a mountain. That real history gives the abbey a claim no other location in the story has, because Maria was genuinely a postulant behind these walls.

On screen. Robert Wise filmed the exterior scenes of The Sound of Music at Nonnberg in 1964, and they are among the most recognisable in the picture. The great studded wooden gates in the outer wall are the ones Maria runs through at the start, and the courtyard inside the entrance is where the nuns gather; the Maria number, in which the sisters ask how you solve a problem like her, was staged in and around this courtyard and its arcades, and the later scene in which two nuns confess to having removed parts from the Nazi officers' cars was shot in the same space. The abbey refused permission to film inside, so every interior, including the abbess's office and the corridor where Maria hides her family, was constructed at the Twentieth Century Fox lot in Los Angeles. The wedding is the point most visitors get wrong: that sequence was filmed in the Basilica of St Michael at Mondsee, thirty kilometres east, not at Nonnberg, although the real Maria and Georg von Trapp were in fact married in this church in 1927.

What you can actually visit. The nuns keep enclosure, so the cloister, the gardens and the conventual buildings are closed. The abbey church is open to visitors outside services, and the outer courtyard can be entered freely. The quiet reward is the sung liturgy: the community chants the conventual mass early each morning, audible from the public part of the church through the grille that separates the nuns' choir, and there is a tradition of the sisters singing at Christmas that fills the building. A small shop sells the community's work.

Getting there and timing. From the old town, walk up Kaigasse to the foot of the Nonnbergstiege and climb the steps, which are steep and uneven; alternatively the Festungsgasse road that serves the fortress funicular passes the abbey on a gentler gradient and can be driven or walked. The site is not suitable for wheelchairs by the stair route. There is no admission charge and no ticket office, which also means no crowd management, so the courtyard can fill with tour groups in the middle of the day and empty completely by six in the evening. Combining Nonnberg with the fortress above it makes an efficient morning, since the two entrances are only a few minutes apart on the same hill.