Schwarzach im Pongau#

Schwarzach im Pongau, province of Salzburg, market town in the district of Sankt Johann, alt. 601 m, pop. 3,489, area 3.20 km2, railway junction in the middle of the Salzach valley. - Motor vehicle test station, forestry commission, hospital with nursing school, Lebenshilfe welfare organisation, sports and festival hall, Schwarzach (built in 1958, 120 MW) and Wallnerau (built in 1989, 17.1 MW) power stations of the Tauernkraftwerke AG; Schwarzach´s most important employers are the hospital and the Austrian Federal Railways (station and workshops), large photo laboratory, aluminium processing industry, building and construction trade, tourism (16,998 overnight stays in 1992). - Baroque vicariate church (1736-1741), reconstructed and enlarged after a fire in 1981 by C. Holzmeister, who integrated the surviving Baroque interior (high altar with columns); Schernberg Palace (Gothic core, altered in the 19th  century, today hospital and care institution); the palace also houses the filial church of the Visitation of Mary, with late-Gothic winged altar and Gothic sculpture of the Virgin Mary (around 1450); in the town hall so-called "Salt licker table" (1729), where the Protestant Peasants of Pongau met (and licked salt from their fingers as a sign of their determination to keep their belief) in 1731 before the Great Salzburg Protestant Emigration (expulsion of around 30,000 Protestants).