If you are looking for an amusing hours outing, head to the northwest corner of the Mirabell Gardens and take a stroll through the Salzburg Dwarf garden. Gathering joyfully along a shaded path you will find a fistful of whimsical little people. 
Their sometimes grotesque features call out to rub bulbous noses and polish bald heads, a disfigured peddler woman offers you a bouquet of flowers and a bespectacled onlooker sticks his tongue out as you pass by.
The Salzburg Dwarf Garden first started entertaining Salzburg citizens in 1715 when then Prince Archbishop Franz Anton Harrach commissioned them to be carved from piles of Untersberg granite. The figures were modeled after real people living at the court, local townsfolk and peasants. Years later Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria was so disturbed by the disfigured caricatures he had them removed from the Dwarf Garden. Out of concern for his wife and their unborn child, Ludwig ordered the gathering of statues with their goiters, hunchbacks and cranial hematoma’s to be destroyed. 
In the end they were only auctioned off and the little people were forgotten for over a hundred years. In 1921 the dwarfs were rediscovered, collected and carefully restored. Today they are happy to entertain a new generation of Salzburg visitors and you shouldn’t pass up the opportunity to stop by and say hello!
