Salzburg Old Town

Salzburg Old Town is one of the best-preserved and most architecturally distinguished historic city centres in the German-speaking world, a dense urban landscape of baroque churches, medieval streets, aristocratic townhouses, and enclosed private courtyards grouped around one of Europe's most theatrically impressive squares, the Domplatz.

The cathedral, built over the site of earlier Romanesque and Gothic churches and rebuilt after a catastrophic fire in 1598, presents its imposing twin-towered baroque facade to the square in early Italianate style, the copper dome visible from much of the old town and marking the spiritual centre of the archbishopric that ruled Salzburg for more than a thousand years and gave the city its distinctive character as a prince-bishopric of considerable political and cultural independence.

The Getreidegasse, the old town's principal shopping street, preserves its medieval street pattern of enclosed courtyards opening off the main pedestrian lane, the courtyards themselves still bearing the painted facades and decorative wells of the trading houses that gave the street its name as the grain exchange of the medieval city.

Mozart was born at Getreidegasse 9 in 1756, and the yellow facade of that building draws a devoted pilgrimage from the composer's international audience, though Salzburg's cultural identity was long determined by the archbishopric's patronage rather than by music alone.

The summer music festival, founded in 1920 and still running annually, is among the world's three or four most distinguished music and drama festivals, and its principal venue, the Felsenreitschule, a former riding school set into the rocky hillside beneath the Festspielhaus, provides one of the most memorable theatrical spaces in Europe with its three tiered rows of arched openings in the natural rock face.

The Festspielhaus itself, built in 1923 on the site of the medieval duke's castle, completes the festival district on the hill above the old town.

The Festung Hohensalzburg, built in stages between 1077 and 1143 and never destroyed or substantially altered, sits intact on its rocky hill, the largest medieval fortress in central Europe, with its original Romanesque palace rooms and chapel accessible by cable car or on foot.

The archbishopric's patronage of the arts produced not only the cathedral and the fortress but a whole urban fabric of baroque churches, collegiate buildings, and university architecture that gives Salzburg its distinctive golden-grey roofscape when seen from the Gaisberg or from the Kapuzinerberg to the east, a view that has changed less in two centuries than almost any comparable European city.

The architectural ensemble of the Domplatz, cathedral, and fortress represents one of the most complete statements of ecclesiastical and secular baroque urban planning surviving in Europe.

The Felsenreitschule is among the most visually extraordinary theatre venues in the world, a space whose physical drama enhances every performance.

The Getreidegasse preserves its medieval spatial structure intact, making it one of the few European shopping streets where the urban fabric of a medieval trading city can still be read on the ground.