Museum der Moderne

Perched sixty metres above the old town on the sheer cliff of the Mönchsberg, the Museum der Moderne sits where the legendary Café Winkler once dominated the Salzburg skyline for decades. When the café was demolished, 145 architectural teams competed to design its replacement. The Munich-based firm of Friedrich Hoff Zwink won, and the museum opened in October 2004 — a sharp-edged modernist box clad entirely in local Untersberg marble that manages to look both confrontational and inevitable against the Baroque cityscape below.

The building houses roughly 25,000 square feet of gallery space across three levels, exhibiting 20th and 21st-century art with a particular strength in photography and graphic works. The permanent collection holds around 55,000 pieces, with a focus on Austrian photography after 1945 and an expanding international contemporary collection. The temporary exhibitions rotate frequently and often feature challenging, boundary-pushing work — this is not a museum that plays it safe.

But the real draw might be the panorama terrace. Step outside the museum and you're standing on the edge of a cliff with the entire old town spread below you — cathedral domes, Getreidegasse rooftops, the river, the fortress on the opposite hill. On a clear day, the Alps fill the southern horizon. It is one of the most photographed viewpoints in Salzburg and it's free to access even without a museum ticket.

You reach the museum via the Mönchsbergaufzug, an elevator blasted through sixty metres of solid rock. The original lift was built in 1890 by banker Karl Leitner, powered by batteries charged during daylight hours when the electricity wasn't needed for street lamps. Today's modernised version carries 1.3 million passengers a year, making the thirty-second ride from the old town to the clifftop one of Salzburg's most efficient transitions from medieval to contemporary.