Schloss Fronburg

Frohnburg stands beside the Hellbrunner Allee in Salzburg, a Salzburger Landschloss set inside the Hellbrunn landscape garden. Its name recalls the old word for ‘lord’s seat’, though it was also once called Grafenauerhof or Schloss Kuenburg. The present building began in 1672 under Archbishop Max Gandolf Kuenburg after a small 17th-century house was enlarged. The Kuenburg family owned it for nearly three centuries until the Republic of Austria took it over in 1960. Today the castle belongs to the Mozarteum University and houses parts of its academy and a student hall. The place is worth the journey for the surviving baroque garden fragments and the Delfinbrunnen. The wrought-iron gateway from the 17th century still guards the single historic drive on the west side. Two rectangular garden ponds and a restored central fountain bowl recall the former layout, while the wall fountain shows a copy of an antique Amor on a dolphin. The scene was first recorded in 19th-century catalogues and later matched to an engraving of 1593. The castle’s east front looks toward the Salzach, and its high enclosing wall keeps the garden quiet. Visitors find a walled courtyard on the west, reached through the old gate flanked by porter’s lodges. Inside the enclosure the university’s rooms occupy the main building, while the eastern meadow shows traces of the once grand tree-lined avenue to Grafenau. A surviving orchard avenue planted in 2014 follows the original plan, and the old farmyard east of the park now serves as a Montessori kindergarten. The Delfinbrunnen and the two garden ponds remain the clearest reminders of the baroque scheme, set against the modern life of the Mozarteum.