Abbey
Also known as stift-nonnberg
Founded around 712 AD, Nonnberg is the oldest continuously existing nunnery in the German-speaking world, and the community of Benedictine sisters living here today has never once left.
Saint Rupert of Salzburg chose the broad terrace above the old Roman settlement of Juvavum for the new community, and his relative Saint Erentrudis arrived around 712-715 AD to become its first abbess. She led a small group of women in a life of prayer, charity, and adult education at a time when literate women running institutions was almost unheard of. Her tomb lies in the crypt below the main altar, elevated in 1624, and she is still venerated across Salzburg under the title Landesmutter, Mother of the Province.
The church standing today is the product of a Gothic reconstruction between 1464 and 1509, after a catastrophic fire in 1423 destroyed the earlier Romanesque building. What visitors enter is a late-Gothic interior with rounded Romanesque arches at the gate and fragments of 12th-century frescoes on the interior walls, among the oldest surviving in Austria. The Johanneskapelle, a small side chapel built between 1448 and 1451, contains a late-Gothic winged altar from 1498 attributed to the workshop of Veit Stoss. It requires prior arrangement with the abbey to visit. The bell tower gained its onion dome in 1711, a Baroque addition that now defines Nonnberg’s silhouette against Hohensalzburg Fortress on the ridge above.
Maria von Trapp entered Nonnberg as a postulant in 1924. The abbess sent her temporarily to tutor one of Georg von Trapp’s children, she never returned to take final vows, and on 26 November 1927 she and Georg were married in the abbey church. The 1965 film used the exterior and the cemetery for establishing shots, but the wedding scene was filmed at Basilika Mondsee, about 30 kilometers away. Most visitors assume the opposite, which the nuns have been quietly correcting for sixty years. The cemetery beside the church also connects directly to Petersfriedhof, the ancient burial ground of Stift St. Peter, on the slope below.
The sisters still sing Gregorian chant daily. Vespers are open to the public: Monday to Saturday at 5:00 pm, Sunday at 4:30 pm. They are the one moment when the enclosed community is genuinely present to visitors, voices carrying through stone walls that have held the same rhythms since the abbey’s founding.
Do it here
These experiences include this place in their authored route.
The iconic coach tour of Salzburg and Salzkammergut filming locations from the 1965 film. ~4 hours. Mirabell Gardens (Do-Re-Mi staircase), Schloss Leopoldskron, Nonnberg Abbey, Mondsee church. One of the most popular tourist activities in Salzburg. For many first-time visitors, the primary reason they chose Salzburg.
People
sculptor1732 - 1810
Sculptor and son of Lorenz Hagenauer, the Mozart family's landlord and Leopold's closest friend. He grew up in the same house as the young Mozart family (Getreidegasse 9) and created works that are still seen in Nonnberg Abbey and Salzburg Cathedral.
actorb. 1935
The actress whose performance in The Sound of Music (1965) is responsible, more than any other single event, for Salzburg's status as one of the world's most visited tourist destinations. Her opening sequence on the Untersberg meadow, arms outstretched, is one of the most recognised images in cinema.
educator1905 - 1987
The real Maria. A novice at Nonnberg Abbey before marrying widowed naval officer Georg von Trapp, Maria became world famous through the 1959 musical The Sound of Music and the 1965 film. Her life and the filming locations in and around Salzburg draw millions of tourists to the city each year.
director1914 - 2005
Director of The Sound of Music (1965), which won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director. His decision to shoot on location rather than in a studio made Salzburg itself a character in the film, with consequences for the city's tourism identity that persist six decades later.
saint660 - 718
The founding abbess of Nonnberg Abbey, the oldest continuously inhabited convent north of the Alps. Niece of Saint Rupert of Salzburg, who founded the abbey for her around 714 AD.
saint650 - 718
The founding father of Salzburg. Around 696 AD, Rupert established the two oldest religious institutions in the city: Stift St. Peter and Nonnberg Abbey. He consecrated the ground where Salzburg Cathedral would later rise, making him the single most important figure in Salzburg's origin story.
Organizations
Metropolitan archdiocese governing the Catholic Church in Salzburg since Saint Rupert of Salzburg established the first bishopric c. 696 AD. Thirteen centuries of institutional continuity. The archbishops were sovereign princes who built the Cathedral, the Residenz, the fortress, and the baroque city.
Curated routes
The fifteen sights we mark on the map we hand every guest, in the order I would walk them. It starts on the right bank, crosses into the old town, climbs to the fortress, and comes back over the Mozartsteg. Half a day at a stroll, or a full one if you go inside things.
