Werfen

Where it sits. Werfen is a market town of about three thousand people in the Salzach valley, forty kilometres south of Salzburg, at an altitude of 548 metres. The valley narrows sharply here — this is the Salzachöfen, the gorge where the river cuts between two massifs — and the town occupies the last stretch of flat ground before the walls close in. To the east rises the Tennengebirge, a plateau of bare karst; to the west the Hagengebirge and the Hochkönig. On a rock spur in the middle of the valley floor sits Hohenwerfen Fortress, and directly opposite, 1,600 metres up the eastern wall, is the black slot in the cliff that is the entrance to the Eisriesenwelt. Few Alpine towns pack this much vertical drama into a single view from the main street.

The fortress and the ice cave. Hohenwerfen was begun between 1075 and 1078 by Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg during the Investiture Controversy, one of a chain of strongholds built to hold the Salzach corridor. It served as a garrison, a hunting seat and, for long stretches, a prison — Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, the man who began baroque Salzburg, died a captive in it in 1617. It burned in 1931 and was restored; today it is shown with a falconry display on the meadow below the keep, one of the oldest working raptor programmes in Austria. The Eisriesenwelt on the far side is the largest ice cave in the world by surveyed length, more than forty kilometres, of which roughly the first kilometre is coated in ice. Anton Posselt found the entrance in 1879; Alexander von Mörk pushed the exploration from 1912 and his ashes are interred in an urn inside. The cave breathes: cold winter air sinks in, summer meltwater freezes on contact, and the temperature at the entrance stays below zero all year.

On screen. Werfen carries two very different film credits, and travellers routinely confuse them. The first is The Sound of Music (1965). The "Do-Re-Mi" sequence — the picnic, the children lying in a row on the grass, the bicycles wobbling along a farm track — was filmed on the Gschwandtanger, a broad meadow on the valley floor just north of the town, with Hohenwerfen sitting on its rock in the background of several shots. The unit worked here across a handful of days in the summer of 1964, and the meadow is still open pasture, reachable on foot from the town centre in fifteen minutes. The second credit is Where Eagles Dare (1968), in which Hohenwerfen plays the Schloss Adler, the Alpine castle Richard Burton and Clint Eastwood infiltrate. Only the exteriors are Werfen; the interiors were built at MGM's Borehamwood studios, and — the detail almost every guidebook gets wrong — the cable car on whose roof the fight takes place is not at Werfen at all. Hohenwerfen has no cable car of that kind. That sequence was shot on the Feuerkogel aerial tramway above Ebensee, ninety kilometres north-east in the Salzkammergut.

What you actually see today. The town itself is a single long street of gabled houses, a parish church and a well-known inn or two; it is not a museum piece and does not pretend to be. The fortress is reached either by a twenty-minute uphill walk or by a small funicular from the visitor centre. Getting to the ice cave is a genuine half-day expedition and worth understanding before you commit: a narrow road climbs to the Wimmerhütte car park at 1,084 metres, then a twenty-minute walk on a rock path, then a cable car that lifts you 500 metres in three minutes, then another twenty-minute climb on a ledge path to the portal at 1,641 metres. The guided tour inside covers about 700 metres of ice formations lit by carbide lamps, climbs and descends 700 steps, and lasts roughly seventy minutes at a steady zero to minus one degree.

Getting there and timing. Werfen has its own station on the Salzburg–Villach railway, about forty minutes from Salzburg, and the Tauern Autobahn passes just outside. The ice cave runs from the start of May to the end of October, with the last tours leaving in mid-afternoon; the fortress is open from April to early November plus a winter season around Christmas. Bring a warm jacket and proper shoes for the cave even in August — cotton and sandals are a well-documented mistake. Late May and September give the clearest air, the fullest meadows and the shortest queues for the cable car.