Last minute holiday fans, what if I told you there was a European city break destination surrounded by breathtaking mountains where you’re constantly stumbling across Gothic churches and picturesque squares.
Not to mention the £3 beers made with a secret recipe monks came up with 400 years ago, and the fact you can fly there from London for just £18.
I’m talking about Salzburg, Austria, formerly an independent church state until around 200 years ago, and now more famous as the birthplace of Mozart and a mecca for Sound of Music superfans.
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It’s so chock full of massive churches, it’s often dubbed ‘the Rome of the North’.
I was invited by Wizz Air to see what the city had to offer. If you fancy saving £165 on tourist attractions and getting the inside scoop of one of the city’s best drinking destinations, these are the four things you absolutely need to do when visiting Salzburg.
Buy the Salzburg Card that can save you £165 on tourist attractions
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We were given one of these beauties during our visit, and even if you don’t want to go hell for leather sprinting between museums and historic sites, it’s well worth the €31 (£26) investment.
That gets you free access to more than 20 attractions for 24 hours, including Mozart’s birthplace and residence, the Stiegl-Brauwelt brewery and beer museum, and the famous 11th century Hohensalzburg fortress.
If museums aren’t your thing, you’ll easily break even using the various cable cars and funiculars to take in some astonishing views of the city, like these ones:
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My favourite part about having the card was that you can take a punt on some of the more batsh**t attractions without worrying about wasting your money. I’m talking about the Christmas museum, the marionette museum and (the place I paid a visit) Bible World.
A sign at the entrance to Bible World, which is about a 15 minute walk for the town centre, advises that ‘you need courage to slip into the Bible’ - courage being the operative word here.
This nightmarish, labyrinthine place, complete with crawl spaces, claustrophobic slides, giant feet and pitch black tunnels with uneven surfaces, is apparently meant to be an interactive museum bringing stories from the Bible to life.
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Admittedly it might have made more sense if I’d managed to get the audio guide to work.
While I might have been a little peeved paying the €11 entrance fee for something this bizarre, I’ll gladly chalk it up as a character building experience when it comes free with the Salzburg card.
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If you visited every single attraction that’s free with the card, you would save €196.30 (£165.33) on entrance fees. Best of luck!
Visit the 400-year-old Augustiner brewery
I’ve sampled a fair bit of beer in my time, but the stuff they brew here truly is something special.
Augustinian monks set up the brewery in 1621, and they’re still using the same secret recipe nowadays.
The process of ordering your bevs is a blast from the past. First you need to pick up a stone jug and wash it in one of the fountains (preferably without splashing water all over yourself like I did).
Then beer is served straight from the barrel into your jug. Half a litre (just short of a pint) is €3.60 (£3), if you’re especially thirsty a litre is €7.20 (£6).
Then all you need to do is take a seat in the 1,400 seat beer garden and enjoy. Food served on site includes bratwurst with dollops of mustard, massive pretzels, stacks of thinly-sliced sauteed potatoes and various gigantic slabs of meat.
Eat as much food as possible
Speaking of grub, you’re going to want to sample as much of it as possible.
The schnitzel and bratwurst are as great as you’d expect, but so are lesser known dishes like Spätzle - technically egg noodles which taste more like a less stodgy version of gnocchi.
Then there’s Kaiserschmarrn, essentially lots of torn up sugary pancake bits served with apple sauce.
Wherever we ate, portions ranged from generous to wildly optimistic of our stomach capacities.
Get out into the mountains
As part of our trip we spent some time in the Schladming-Dachstein region, around an hour and a half train journey from Salzburg.
Primarily a ski resort in winter, in summer it’s a haven for hiking and (for the more fearless) via ferrata - climbing/scrambling while attached to metal cables pinned into the rock face.
Just look at this guy. Has he got a death wish?
We took the cable car up to the Dachstein mountain, a knee-trembling 2,700m (8,800ft) above sea level, where you can test your head for heights on the stairways to heaven and nothingness - flights of stairs to viewpoints dangling off the mountain top into empty air.
What was truly special was the ice cave inside the Dachstein glacier. It’s full of impressive ice sculptures which are replaced every two years with a new theme - when we visited they were all linked to alpine researcher Friedrich Simony. All this underneath 6m of ice.
The cave, which opened in 2007, is incredibly fragile. Only 40 people are allowed in at once so their body heat doesn’t impact the glacier, but even so our guide estimated it would all be gone in 10 years as the glacier continues to retreat with the impact of climate change.
Sorry to end on a downer, folks.
Wizz Air flies out from London Luton direct to Salzburg on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays, with prices starting from £17.99 for a one-way flight and £35.98 for a return.
Topics: Travel, Food And Drink
Simon Fearn