Old town is safe

Mountain cleaners give the all-clear after inspection

As in the summer (picture), the professionals from Salzburg City Council also patted down the Mönchsberg on Monday.(Bild: Tschepp Markus)

After the fire department operation on Saturday, the professionals from the City of Salzburg came to clear the Mönchsberg - ten of them. For three hours, the mountain cleaners descended the high rock face step by step. Residents and passers-by can feel safe again around the House of Nature.

It seems certain since Monday. There is no major danger from the high rock face near the Haus der Natur. After all, a rock had fallen from it onto a car. The Salzburg mountain cleaners came to this reassuring conclusion.

Their boss Jörg Eßl reached the "Krone" late Monday morning. The three-hour inspection of the Mönchsberg wall had already been completed by then. "We drove down the wall one after the other with the whole crew. This meant we didn't have to close traffic for so long. We didn't find any break-out points," said the master mountain cleaner, giving the all-clear. It was only a single stone that landed in the Gstättengasse. But monitoring is important. After all, the Stadtberg is not without rockfall hazards.

Here above Anton-Neumayr-Platz in Salzburg, a stone came loose on Saturday and fell onto a car. A drone had carried out an initial inspection of the roofs and the rock face.(Bild: zfg)

"Pile of gravel pressed together"
"The Mönchsberg is a compressed pile of gravel from the last ice age. Stones come loose from the conglomerate all year round," says Eßl. The mountain cleaners therefore regularly tap it very carefully and remove plants that penetrate the conglomerate with their roots. This year in June and July, they checked the entire mountain.

The closure of the square and the drone flight by the professional fire department caused quite a stir in the local area around Anton-Neumayr-Platz on Saturday evening.