Hellbrunner Berg

The Hellbrunner Berg rises as the southernmost city hill within Salzburg’s limits, entirely enclosed by the grounds of Schloss Hellbrunn and bordered by sheer cliffs that drop toward the Tiergarten Hellbrunn zoo. Rising from the Salzach’s flood plain, the hill reaches 515 metres above sea level while the surrounding land sits only 427 to 437 metres high. Its steep flanks are built from ancient river gravels laid down and cemented into conglomerate rock long before the last ice age. The hill carries traces of human use for at least five thousand years, from Neolithic farmers to Bronze Age miners who carved terraced platforms from the living stone. In the late Hallstatt period this became a centre of salt trade wealth, and later Archbishop Markus Sittikus turned it into a grand hunting park. The Steintheater, carved from the rock face in 1615, is the oldest surviving open-air stage north of the Alps and was designed for performances of Monteverdi’s Orfeo. A small hunting lodge, now called the Monatsschlösschen, was built in a month to impress a passing noble and now houses a folk museum. Visitors follow paths that lead past the Steintheater’s half-natural, half-hewn seating to the Monatsschlösschen’s viewpoint over the Salzach meadows. Fissures in the cliffs shelter breeding Gänsegeier, reintroduced in 1966, while Uhus and Dohlen nest in the same rock walls. The plateau above is clothed in a rich mixed woodland where 311 species of fungi have been recorded, a legacy of the hill’s long protection from forestry. From the Hohe Aussicht and the Waldemsschlösschen terraces the eye travels across the wide Salzach flood plain toward the distant Untersberg.