Schloss Leopoldskron

Where it sits. Schloss Leopoldskron stands on the southern edge of Salzburg, about two kilometres from the old town, at the head of an artificial pond called the Leopoldskroner Weiher on the flat marshy ground beneath the Monchsberg. The view from its water terrace is the reason the house is famous: across the pond and up to the Hohensalzburg fortress and the wooded ridge, with the Untersberg massif closing the horizon to the south-west. The pond itself was dug as part of the estate and freezes hard most winters, when locals skate on it. The palace is a compact rococo block of pale render with a mansard roof, not a great sprawling residence, and it reads much larger from the water than it does from the road.

The story behind it. Prince-Archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian, the same ruler who expelled more than twenty thousand Protestants from the archbishopric in 1731 and 1732, built the house from 1736 as a family seat, and the Firmians held it for a century. Its second life began in 1918, when Max Reinhardt, the Austrian theatre director who had just co-founded the Salzburg Festival, bought the derelict building and spent two decades restoring it. He rebuilt the great hall, installed the library, and created the Venetian Room, a small mirrored and gilded chamber assembled from eighteenth-century fragments, and he used the house as a stage in its own right, entertaining the festival's writers and actors there. In 1938 the Nazi authorities confiscated the estate because Reinhardt was Jewish; he emigrated and died in New York in 1943. Since 1947 the palace has housed the Salzburg Global Seminar, a residential institute founded by three young Harvard men who wanted a place where Europeans and Americans could argue in the same room, and it now also operates as a hotel.

On screen. The Sound of Music used Leopoldskron for the lake side of the von Trapp family home, and the geography of the film's villa is a splice of two buildings. The entrance front, the drive and the gates belong to Schloss Frohnburg, several hundred metres away; the garden terrace, the balustrade and the water behind them are Leopoldskron. The production built a temporary stone terrace and a boathouse at the pond's edge, and it is there that the children fall out of the rowing boat into the water when their father arrives with the baroness, a sequence filmed in cold weather that the child actors remembered for years afterwards. The Venetian Room served as the model for the ballroom set built on a soundstage in Los Angeles, where Maria and the captain dance the Landler. None of the film's interiors were shot in the house itself.

What you actually see today. Because the palace is a working conference centre and hotel, it is not a public monument: the grounds are private, and the gate on Leopoldskronstrasse is closed to casual visitors. What is public is the path along the western and southern banks of the Weiher, which gives the classic view of the terrace and the fortress behind it, and which is a genuinely pleasant twenty-minute walk from the Nonntal district. Staying overnight, eating in the restaurant or joining one of the occasional guided tours is the only way inside, and guests get the great hall, the library with its carved wooden gallery, the marble staircase and the Venetian Room.

The wider corner of the city. Leopoldskron sits in a quiet residential quarter that most visitors never reach, and it pairs naturally with two neighbours. The Hellbrunn palace and its trick fountains, built for Markus Sittikus from 1613, are a further two kilometres south, and the glass gazebo used for Sixteen Going on Seventeen was moved to the Hellbrunn grounds in 1991 after souvenir hunters damaged it at its original site. In the other direction, the Monchsberg lift climbs from the old town to the ridge above the pond, where the modern art museum and a terrace café look down on the whole basin.

Getting there and timing. Bus 21 runs from the city centre to the Leopoldskron Untere Strasse stop; walking from the old town through the Nonntal takes about half an hour. Late spring and summer give the reflection shot from the far bank with the leaves out, while a hard January freezes the pond into a public ice rink with the fortress rising behind the skaters, which is the single most Salzburg image the city offers in winter. Book any interior visit well ahead, since conference weeks close the house entirely.