Nonnberg Abbey

The Benedictine nunnery on the lower slope of the Festungsberg is reached by a steep stone staircase from Kaigasse. The late-Gothic abbey church is small but extraordinary: a sensitive 15th-century rebuild that kept Romanesque elements, with original wing-altar paintings still in place.

The nuns are an enclosed order, so most of the convent is off-limits, but the church and cemetery are open and almost always empty. Get here in the late afternoon when the light slants through the choir windows.

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Nonnberg is the oldest continuously operating nunnery in the German-speaking world, founded around 715 by St Rupert. The real Maria von Trapp was a novice here in the 1920s; the chapel in The Sound of Music wedding scene was filmed at Mondsee, but the cloister gates you see in the film are real Nonnberg.

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