Another "Lock Bridge" - Salzburg, Austria

We got home on the 4th of July and felt like the Fireworks were a welcoming salvo for weary travelers.  The time difference meant that we arrived one hour after we left Frankfurt, Germany even though we had been in the air for 10 ½ hours.  Several days later we are still not completely back to a normal sleep/wake cycle but little by little things are getting put in order.

Two years ago when I returned from France I put up a blog entry about the Lock Bridge in Paris.  Imagine my delight and surprise when we found a similar bridge in Salzburg, Austria.  Unlike Paris, where the city tries to discourage the placing of these locks on the bridges, Salzburg seems to have embraced the idea.  There were vendors near the bridge that sold the padlocks and even offered an engraving service.  We noticed that many of the locks had initials or names engraved on them.  Not as many strings or ribbons attached to the locks as on the bridge in Paris but there were a few.  Most of the locks were small and in a variety of different colors.  Both sides of the bridge were equally covered in locks.  We saw several people stop and look at them, read the names, smile and walk the rest of the way across the bridge. 

This same bridge hosts a project by the University of Salzburg that posts information about the city history and changes the display banners each month.  The banners on the bridge during the time we were there told of the immigrants’ story; how young men and women came into Salzburg around the mid 1900s looking for work, young women primarily getting jobs in the food and hotel industries, the young men working in shops or industry.   The narrative explained how they found work, the places where they lived and why they decided to stay.  Part of one of the banners can be seen at the upper right side of the photo at the top of this page.  Since some of these immigrants met and fell in love, then stayed in Salzburg, it seemed especially fitting that the banners were on this particular “love” bridge.