Is a village you can walk end to end in under half an hour worth two nights of your trip? Hallstatt is, because the lakefront is only the ground floor: above it is a salt mine you go down on a miners' wooden slide, and across the water a cable car climbs to ice caves and a steel platform hung off a cliff.
Salt has been cut from the mountain here for some seven thousand years, and the mine above the roofs is billed as the oldest in the world. Coach tours give the village about two hours of the ground floor, in the middle of the day.
Coach tours from Salzburg and Vienna arrive between eleven and one in summer and leave around five, and between those hours the lakefront lane and the market square are packed. The classic postcard view is a five minute walk north of the square; go before nine, or share it. The early start has a second reason: after half past nine the car parks begin to fill.
Up the stone steps from the square, the chapel beside the Catholic parish church, the Katholische Pfarrkirche Hallstatt, holds the village's strangest room. Its charnel house holds more than six hundred skulls painted with names, dates and wreaths of flowers, moved there in a second burial when a grave was reused. In summer it opens at ten; from November to March it keeps short midday hours and closes on Mondays and Tuesdays.
Sleep on the square if you can. The yellow Seehotel Grüner Baum sits right on it, a little dated but comfortable, with rooms over the lake or the square, and the village you walk out into after the last coach has gone is quiet and nearly empty. Lahn, the flat southern end, has the lake beach and the start of the Echern valley walk; Obertraun, at the head of the lake, is cheaper and quieter under the cable car, but its kitchens keep short hours out of season.
The electric boats rented on the quay are the way to see the village from the water, and by afternoon the wait for one can run past an hour, so be there when the hire opens. The lake beach at Lahn is the place to swim.
The new funicular climbs to the high valley, and the Skywalk beside its top station hangs about three hundred and sixty metres above the roofs. From there a path leads to the mine entrance across the Hallstatt Prehistoric Cemetery, the burial ground of the early miners, whose graves gave a whole age of European prehistory the name Hallstatt.
Inside, the guided tour runs about ninety minutes on foot and down the miners' wooden slides, past an underground salt lake. It stays around eight degrees all year, so bring a layer, and allow three hours from the funicular and back. Book ahead: in summer a same-day place is not a given.
Sleep on the square if you can.
The top floor is across the lake at Obertraun, a short bus ride from Lahn, where the Dachstein Krippenstein cable car climbs in stages. Its first stop, Schönbergalm, is a fifteen to twenty minute walk from both the Giant Ice Cave and the Mammoth Cave. Each is guided and takes about fifty minutes, and one cave is plenty for a day; they open from May to 1 November, and the Mammoth Cave's last tours leave at two, or three in high summer.
The second section carries on to Krippenstein, and from its station a walk of thirty to forty minutes reaches the 5fingers, five steel platforms over a drop of about five hundred metres. Save it for the clearest morning of the stay. In cloud there is nothing to see, and a strong wind spoils it even when the sky is clear.
West of the village, twenty-five minutes by car, the lower Gosausee lies under the Dachstein glacier with a level four kilometre path around it, an hour at a walk and easy with a pushchair. Go in the morning, when the water is still enough to hold the reflection; storms often build in the afternoon.
Most arrivals are by road, and the centre is closed to private cars by day, hotel guests included. Leave the car at P1, the year-round car park with a shuttle into the village, or at P2 in summer; neither can be booked for a day visit, and on busy summer days both can be full by midday, so come early.
By rail, Hallstatt station is on the far shore, and the ferry is timed to meet the trains: about ten minutes across, every day of the year, cash only. Salzburg is about an hour away by car and closer to three hours by train with changes.
Cash matters around the whole lake, from the ferry to a number of the cafés. Food and souvenirs near the square are geared to the day crowd, so eat for convenience and save the evening for the walk. Most of the houses in the photographs are lived in: signs in several languages ask visitors off the private steps and gardens, and flying a drone here is banned.
The Soleleitungsweg, the path along the old brine pipeline toward Bad Goisern, is closed from the Salzberg to Steeg after rockfall, with no date set to reopen. From Steeg on to Bad Ischl it is open and runs almost level along the slope.
