Schloss Leopoldskron

Also known as Leopoldskron Palace

Rococo palace on the shores of Leopoldskroner Weiher, commissioned in 1736 by Archbishop Leopold Anton von Firmian and purchased by theatre director Max Reinhardt in 1918. Reinhardt turned it into the creative headquarters of the early Salzburg Festival and his own artistic home. The Nazis confiscated it in 1938 after Reinhardt fled.

Schloss Leopoldskron south of Salzburg is a 1736 Rococo palace whose lake-and-fortress reflection is one of Salzburg’s most photographed images, used in “The Sound of Music” as the stand-in for the von Trapp villa. Built by Archbishop Firmian, owned between 1918 and 1938 by theater director Max Reinhardt (co-founder of the Salzburg Festival), seized by the Nazis, and then used after WWII by the Salzburg Global Seminar, an international dialogue organization founded here in 1947. The palace is now a hotel and conference venue; the grounds are accessible only to guests and seminar participants. The lakeside path outside the fence is public and gives the classic view.