For almost 50 years, The Sound of Music has captured the imagination of moviegoers and musical fans with its catchy tunes and lovable characters set against the stunning Austrian Alps.

And this has proven to be big business for the city of Salzburg, where the real-life singing von Trapp family lived and the 1965 Hollywood movie was filmed.

While Mozart and classical music remain the city's main tourist attractions, half of all visitors who come here every year from the US, Britain, Canada and Asia make the trip because of The Sound of Music, according to the city's tourism office.

"300,000 visitors who come to Salzburg almost exclusively because of The Sound of Music, that's just a great story, a success story," Herbert Brugger, managing director of Salzburg Tourism, told AFP.

"It's the most successful location placement in film history," he said.

Bus tours take visitors around the movie's locations twice a day, Sound of Music dinner-and-concert evenings are organized regularly and the Salzburg puppet theater has even created its own version of the musical.

But Austria itself was slow to catch on to this worldwide craze.

The story of the von Trapp family and their escape from Nazi Germany was made into several German-language films here in the 1950s and was widely known locally.

But the 1959 Broadway musical, on which the Hollywood version was based, only premiered in Vienna in 2005 and in Salzburg in 2011 - to great success.

Most Austrians have never seen the Oscar-winning film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.

Even now, asking a Salzburg resident where one might find the "Do-Re-Mi" steps - where Maria von Trapp teaches the children how to sing in the movie - is likely to provoke a bemused reaction.

AFP