Ninety seconds on Salzwelten Hallstatt
Allow half a day and not an hour. The guided tour runs ninety minutes, and the funicular, the walk up to the miners’ house and the wait for the next group take as long again.
After the funicular there is still a rising quarter of an hour on foot. The tour starts at the miners’ house at the end of it, not at the station. Underground it is level going, about two kilometres of it, and eight degrees whatever the month, so shoes matter more than a coat. The way back out passes the Skywalk platform, hung over the roofs of the village. The high valley around the top station is the other half of the outing: the burial ground, the theme path across it, and the tower with the restaurant and the viewpoint in it. That is why this is a half day rather than an hour.
Explore the rest of Hallstatt
The prehistoric cemetery in the valley above the village, where about fifteen hundred graves were excavated from 1846 and gave their name…
A late Gothic church finished about 1505 on a terrace above the roofs, reached by stone steps, keeping a twelfth century tower and a carved…
Prince-archbishops ran this as an independent state until 1803, paying for it with the salt that gives the river and the town their name,…