Monats Castle

The Monatsschlössl, also known as Waldemsschlösschen, is a 17th-century hunting lodge located on Hellbrunner Berg in the park of Hellbrunn Palace in the south of the Austrian city of Salzburg, which today houses a museum.

In reference to the lineage of its builder, Markus Sittikus von Hohenems, it was originally called Waldems-Schlösschen. Today, it is called Monatsschlössl due to a legend according to which a travelling Bavarian duke or Archduke Maximilian of Austria was supposedly to be surprised with a building constructed in just one single month. However, this legend has been refuted by historians, as the construction took significantly longer than one month.

The small palace, presumably built in 1615, was once aligned with the center of the princely Mannerist palace garden (water parterre), which was originally designed in the form of an elaborate strawberry hill rising between geometrically arranged water basins. This "hill" with its "Turkish strawberries" was a symbol of joy of life and stands as a counterpart to the very similarly built second small palace in the palace park, the now dilapidated Belvedere Palace in the secluded sacred-spiritual part of the park.

From 1920 to 1924, the building housed Eduard Paul Tratz's Bird Museum. From this, in 1924, with the relocation to the Hofstallkaserne - the cavalry barracks, which was to be converted into the Großes Festspielhaus in 1957 - emerged the Museum for Performing and Applied Natural History as the forerunner of the later Haus der Natur.

Today, the Monatsschlössl houses the small but rich Salzburg Museum of Folk Culture of the Salzburg Museum Carolino Augusteum. The collection, founded in 1904, provides an insight into Salzburg folk culture with exhibits of customs, popular piety, living culture, and folk medicine. The traditional costumes typical for Salzburg regions are also shown.

From the Monatsschlössl, there is a view of the garden complex of Hellbrunn Palace.