This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
As the first rays of summer warm the Austrian Alps, the pastures are carpeted with fat buttercups and pink clover. Bees hum over them, and the clang of cowbells rings through a valley of spruce forest. The Tennen Mountains punch high above me, looking like the ramparts of a fantasy fort.
I’m sitting in the meadows above Werfen, an hour’s drive south of the regional capital of Salzburg, breathing in the dewy, pine-fresh morning air and digging my boots into the grass. I can make out the small Alpine market town far below: with its pastel-painted chalets and bauble-domed church, it fits neatly into the picture. It’s a view that makes me want to skip through the pastures with careless abandon, to yodel out loud. A view so perfectly etched, it’s like a film set.
Hollywood thought so, too, as this is where the picnic scene was filmed in the 1965 blockbuster The Sound of Music. English actress Julie Andrews, playing everyone’s favourite nun Maria, strummed her guitar through these fields to teach the curtain-clad von Trapp kids to sing Do-Re-Mi. The movie is Marmite, but the setting steals the show.
And there is indeed a drop of golden sun as I walk along the gentle, hour-long Sound of Music Trail from Werfen to Gschwandtanger, an Alpine meadow above the town. I’m hiking with local tourist office manager Alexandra Hager, one of the trail’s pioneers, who tells me it’s been designed to shine a light on Werfen’s big-screen connections and cinematic beauty. But unlike the filming locations in Salzburg, which tend to be crowd favourites, up here it’s utterly peaceful.
Hohenwerfen Castle was the backdrop the 1968 spy thriller Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton.
Photograph by Andreas Benz, Alamy
“It’s one of a kind,” says Alexandra, flinging an arm out as if to emphasise the beauty of the scene. “I like to get up to Gschwandtanger early, when the air is fresh and the sun comes through the fog, or wind out the day sitting in the meadow on a balmy evening.”
I look out and spot medieval Hohenwerfen Castle sitting scenically on a hill above Werfen. This was the backdrop for another Hollywood cult classic, the 1968 Second World War spy thriller Where Eagles Dare, starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton. With its turrets and towers, the fortress seems more fit for a Disney princess. But neither action movie nor fantasy tale could match the real-life story of the building.
On a guided tour of the castle’s courtyard and vaulted, frescoed interiors, I learn that Hohenwerfen was commissioned in 1077, part of a castle-building spree in the Salzburg region in the wake of political unrest. Over 900 years, it’s been besieged, plundered and burned. During 16th-century peasant revolts, Protestant farmers were imprisoned in its dungeon. Under Bavarian rule from 1803, it fell to rack and ruin, only to be repaired as a hunting lodge in 1824. Nazi officers were trained here. And it’s only since 1987 that its doors have been open to visitors.
The castle’s eagles, these days, appear in bird of prey shows, swooping, screeching and whooping above the castle’s walls. Yet, I find my gaze drifting to the mountains that rise like a curtain above Werfen. I wonder if there are eagles up there, too.
On a high
The next morning, sunrise makes the Tennen Mountains blush in purple-pinks. Though not especially high in Alpine terms, capping out at around 2,400m, these peaks are as wild as they come. Nosediving to the valley, they’re riddled with caves, crevices and sinkholes. And at the top is a karst plateau that’s redolent of the last Ice Age.
“There are many old paths on the mountains, but they aren’t all marked — knowledge is handed down over generations,” says Werfen’s head of mountain rescue Herbert Deutinger, who I meet in the tourist office where I’m renting equipment for the day. “The plateau has views of the Hochkönig massif, but hikers need surefootedness, a head for heights and a helmet to tackle the Hochkogelsteig trail that leads up there.”
Werfen is home to Eisriesenwelt; the world’s largest accessible ice caves.
Photograph by Brian Ormerod, Alamy
The warning isn’t enough to put me off. I take a minibus from Werfen train station to the Eisriesenwelt ice caves visitor centre, where a stiff, 20-minute hike leads up to a cable car. I get out at its top station and almost miss the trailhead to the Hochkogelsteig.
Cut into the mountainside, the trail is barely more than a boot-width wide and includes sections of via ferrata. Heart racing, I pop on my helmet and clip onto the fixed cable securing my safe passage. To my right, cliffs fall to the valley below. The scree slides.
Though not particularly technical, the two-hour climb uphill is stiff, exposed and relentless. There’s no shade and the sun beats down as I grapple with rock, spider across boulders and skitter up ladders hacked into the rock face, at times more acrobat than hiker.
When I reach the plateau, I follow cairns and red-white-red markings evoking the Austrian flag across the pale limestone, which has been battered, scarred and pockmarked by wind and weather over millennia. There isn’t another soul up here; the silence is broken only by the shrill whistle of a golden eagle returning to its eyrie.
The Hochkogelsteig trail includes sections of via ferrata.
Photograph by Richard James Taylor, 4Corners
From the grassy ridge of 2,281m Hochkogel mountain, the view upstages anything I’ve seen so far, reaching deep into the Salzach Valley and over to the ragged Hochkönig massif. The karst plateau is the cake-topper for the world’s largest accessible ice caves, Eisriesenwelt (meaning ‘world of ice giants’), where I head the next morning for a 70-minute guided tour. A blast of cold air, like a freezer door being opened, hits me at their gaping entrance. Visitors swiftly put on layers and coats: it might be summer in the valley, with the thermometer notching 25C, but up here, it’s forever winter, with temperatures hovering around zero.
“On a stormy summer day, the wind blowing out of the cave can reach up to 100km/h [60mph],” says bearded, broad-shouldered guide Franz Reinstadler, as he hands out carbide lamps. The elevation of the caves at 5,383ft means electricity has never been installed. These old-fashioned brass lanterns are used to light our way through the tunnels and passageways — just as they would have when Anton von Posselt-Czorich, a naturalist from Salzburg, discovered them by accident in 1879, tiptoeing 200m into the caves alone.
He didn’t get far before solid ice blocked his way, but he sparked the interest of other intrepid explorers. In 1913, speleologist Alexander von Mörk came with a pickaxe-wielding team, who hammered out steps to the top of the ice wall and discovered a 26-mile labyrinth of frozen tunnels.
We climb 700 steps past a slope of sheer, smooth ice to the highest point of the caves. The ice in the tunnels and chambers at the top is otherworldly, rising in great waves and cascading in falls. May and June are ideal times to visit; there are filigree icicles and huge sculptures, hoarfrost that makes the walls glitter and stalactites as thick as Roman columns.
Franz points out natural shapes in the ice — an elephant, a polar bear, a mammoth, a walrus — and holds up a flare to tunnels as smooth as marble, formations like cut glass and a cathedral-like Eispalast (‘ice palace’). “I love showing visitors the scale and beauty of these caves,” he says. “They’re a true wonder of nature.”
As beautiful as they are, it’s easy to see why locals in centuries past feared the Tennen Mountains as being the gateway to hell — part of the reason why these caves weren’t discovered until the late 19th century. If the carbide lamps we’re carrying were suddenly snuffed out, the darkness and cold would be hellish indeed.
Their actual origin story is slightly more prosaic. We think of water flowing down, but the latest scientific research has shown Eisriesenwelt was formed by intense pressure forcing water some 459ft uphill between 50 and 100 million years ago. And in terms of climate change, the caves are a paradox. Elsewhere in the Alps, glaciers are shrinking and ice is retreating. But the same hot, dry summers that make snow disappear early have pushed meltwater into the caves, where it freezes during the winters. The ice is growing.
I tread carefully back down the steps to the cave entrance. A coming storm has turned the light silver-gold, and the wind boxes my ears. As dazzling as any Hollywood spotlight, a sudden ray of sun makes me shield my gaze as I head back into the hills.
How to do it:
A number of airlines fly direct from the UK to Salzburg in around 2h. From there, ÖBB trains run to Werfen with a journey time of 40 minutes. Via ferrata equipment is available to rent at local Intersport stores. The caves are open from May to October.
Hotel Obauer in Werfen has doubles from €255 (£220), room only.
Published in the Alps guide 2024, distributed with the May 2024 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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