Salzburg Things to Do

Salzburg sits prettily on the river Salzach, hemmed in by the bluff slopes of Kapuzinerberg Mountain. At Christmas, Austria’s most romantic city dons its glad-rags and puts on a splendid show.

As with almost any “free” activity one might recommend, it’s possible to find yourself tempted or inclined to break your fiscal fast and drop a little change. It’s your right to do so, obviously, but the following suggestions can indeed be sampled without spending a dime.

Vienna is not the only city in Austria that has a flourishing café culture. In many ways, the cafes in Salzburg are more diverse. Peruse the following if you’re interested in beginning your education in the world of coffee, beer, wine and conversation that Salzburg has to offer visitors to the city.

Salzburgs’s storied beer-brewing history is encapsulated in Europe’s largest privately owned brewery, the Stiegl Brauwelt, which has been honing the art of brewing since the year Columbus first made contact with the new world. Guided tours of this and other area breweries are high on the list of desirable activities for visitors to Austria’s fourth-largest city. The aforementioned are best combined with a sampling of the city’s culinary culture.

Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof (Central Cemetery) is one of the most famous in Europe (containing as it does a full two million more dead than Paris’s Père Lachaise), and the Jewish cemetery in Währing may be one of the most macabre (following the Holocaust, the grounds have fallen into such a disgraceful state of disrepair that you have to sign a liability waver just to enter the premises). For sheer mystery, history and morbid touristic delight, the Cemetery of St. Marx in the Landstraße district of Vienna is impossible to beat.

Among the many noteworthy activities and destinations in the picturesque state of Tyrol in Western Austria, the rushing gorge known as Zammer Lochputz in Zams is a great choice for nature lovers and travelers with children to entertain.