Salzburg, 19 Oct 2019

For our last full day in Salzburg, we went to Hellbrunn Palace, famous for its trick foundations. For the afternoon, we took it easy and hung out in a café for a while.

Hellbrunn Palace

We had a relatively lazy morning, then set out to take a couple of buses to Hellbrunn Palace. I had been there in the ’70s, and remember it being fun. We picked up tour tickets (again covered by our Salzburg Cards) and were scheduled for the second tour of the day.

The palace was built by the Prince-Archbishop Markus Sittikus in the early 17th century as a summer palace and hunting lodge. He invited guests from throughout Europe, who would find out about the trick fountains.

We had time to walk through the palace before our tour. One room has murals on all the walls and the ceiling, and there was a circular couch that rotated, so you could sit and see the whole room. Another room had a life-sized unicorn and sturgeon hanging from the ceiling. Neither were real, of course.

Trick fountains

Our tour time arrived, so our group followed our guide to the first stop. He spoke both German and English; I wonder if they do single-language tours during the busy seasons.

The reason why the fountains are called trick fountains is that, in addition to performing interesting tricks, there were also used to play pranks on visitors by setting them wet. There was an outdoor sobbing table that would spray the guests (even through hooks on the seats) and if they tried to leave, there was a curtain of water blocking the exit. The Prince-Archbishop’s seat, however, stayed dry.

One of the grottoes has a hollow cone meant to represent a crown. A jet of water pushes the crown up, creating a cone of water. There are areas the guide indicated would stay dry, but as we were going to leave the grotto, he said that the longer people took to leave, the wetter they would get. Fountains created a tunnel for us to walk through, so we didn’t really get wet.

The most intricate item was a miniature theater filled with moving figurines, which was added in the 19th century. To cover all the racket from the mechanism, an organ plays a selection from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Melody and I had happened to step a bit closer to look, which was lucky since at the end the guide set loose a squirt of water from behind, right where we were. It helped that we saw it was wet Bach there, which was an indication that there would be water.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the fountains, even more than the precision with which they were built, was that everything was powered by flowing water. There were no pumps or motors, even got the musical theater.

Palace grounds

The Hellbrunn Palace grounds are quite sprawling. There was a sign saying there was sturgeon in one of the pools, so that explained why there were sturgeon hanging in the museum. We first took a look at the gazebo that was in the Sound of Music during the song, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” (but that wasn't its original location), then walked around the dahlia bed.

The next thing we were going to do was walk up to the view of Watzmann Mountain. On the way up was a vista of the Hellbrunn grounds, as well as of Salzburg, so we naturally stopped by. Continuing to the Watzmann lookout, there was a sign for the Stone Theater (which we had seen on the map), and we figured we may as well check it out. Good thing we did, since it was extremely interesting. We went down steps into what used to be a quarry for construction for Hellbrunn. Going around a corner, we were surprised to see a full-on stage carved out of stone There were some people doing a photoshoot on the stage, but we were able to walk on the side and go into the backstage area.

The Stone Theater was the first location for an opera performance outside of Italy; Monteverdi's “Orfeo” in 1617.

Having dutifully gawked over the theater, we continued a short way further until we got to the lookout for Watzmann Mountain. At first, Untersberg looms large, but you can tell that Watzmann is more impressive, since it's much further away and is about 9,000 feet tall. It also has a stereotypical shape of an Alp.

We worked our way back to the palace area where we had lunch, then rode the bus back to our room.

Rest of the day

Since we missed out on hanging out in a café the day before, we went ahead and did that. We ended up going to a place where there was a table right next to the pastry case. I was the one who had a good look at the items, and the waiter came, so I quickly picked out a coffee hazelnut cake, which was quite good. I also got a hot chocolate, and Melody a latte. The table was small, but fortunately, we didn't both need to use our laptops at the same time, so we traded off.

After a while, we decided it was a good time to get dinner, so we went to a nearby place and had goulash and wurst. We picked up some items for breakfast, then took the bus back to the apartment.