AUSTRIAN ALPS
- The Austrian Lake District
Experience the tradition of sommerfrische – summer
refreshment – beside the shores of Alpine lakes
N
EAR THE TOWN OF BOLUO
in China’s Guangdong
Province, there’s a village by
a lake. It has flower-covered
houses and bubbling
fountains. The squares are swept and the
roofs topped with tiles, and a pointy church
rises by the lakeshore. The village is called
Hallstatt, and it looks too pretty to be true,
as though it’s been picked up from the
pages of a European fairytale.
In a way, it has. In fact, it’s a copy of a
much older Hallstatt. The real one can be
found on the edge of the Hallstättersee about
40 miles from Salzburg. The story goes that
in the early 2000s, some Chinese developers
went in search of the perfect Austrian
village, and they liked Hallstatt so much,
they decided to build their own version.
With its cobbled squares, boathouses
and timber-framed cottages, the Austrian
Hallstatt looks like it’s been designed from
scratch to grace the cover of a tourist
brochure. There’s been a village here since
prehistoric times, when late Bronze Age
settlers mined the surrounding mountains
for salt – a valuable commodity in the days
before refrigeration, and an industry that
has lasted into the 21st century.
Salt made the wider Salzkammergut
region rich. Stretching from the city of
Salzburg eastwards into the Dachstein
mountains, most of this area was once the
private property of the Habsburgs, governed
by its own regional administration known
as the Imperial Salt Chamber, which
oversaw the running of the salt mines
and the vast wealth they generated.
Later, however, the Habsburgs found a
different reason to love the Salzkammergut- the newly fashionable pastime of
sommerfrische (summer refreshment). With
its crystal-clear lakes – 76 in all – the area
became one of Emperor Franz Joseph’s
favourite spots for a break. Throughout his
reign, from 1848 to 1916, he and his wife
Elisabeth returned nearly every year to boat
on the lakes, stroll the shoreline and
hopefully bag an ibex or two while hiking
in the surrounding mountains. It sparked a
local tourist boom that endures to this day.
Hallstatt still seems pickled in time.
It’s enjoyed Unesco protection as a World
Heritage site since 1997, and its buildings
are as perfectly preserved as museum
exhibits. Balconies teeter over the village’s
stone streets, festooned with wisteria and
geraniums. Smoke puffs from chimneys
leaning at improbable angles. Rowboats bob
on the edge of the lake, and reflections of
peaks shimmer on the glassy surface.
Alexander Scheck grew up near the
Hallstättersee. He’s one of only two
fishermen permitted to catch the lake’s
native whitefish, the reinanke – once a
delicacy reserved for emperors, but now
a common sight on local menus. Every
morning, Alexander chugs his barge across
the lake before dawn, gathering in his nets
by hand before heading back to sell his catch
at the village fish shop. It’s a practice
unchanged in centuries, and one that
Alexander maintains with pride. ‘We still
use the old techniques to fish here,’ he says,
heaving in his net and extracting each fish
by hand, giving each its final coup de grâce
against the boat’s gunwale. ‘Hallstatt is a
place where nothing ever changes much.’
Today, people flock to the Salzkammergut
region to immerse themselves in nature and
indulge in sommerfrische for themselves.
Some lakes have become playgrounds for
wealthy cityfolk from Salzburg and Vienna,
while others have kept their traditional
character, with cosy inns and waterfront
cottages dotted along the shorelines.
Manuela Kiesenhofer works for a sailing
school based on Traunsee, one of the largest
lakes in the area. In summer, she spends
every day out on the water, teaching her
students the sailing basics: tacking, jibing,
how to use the wind and when to trim a sail.
‘I could never sit in an office all day,’ she
says, leaning out from the yacht’s starboard
side as she hauls on a rope to make the
mainsail snap taut. ‘I’d miss the feel of the
wind on my face too much.’ She swings
behind the helm and plots a course for the
town of Gmunden. It’s late afternoon, and
the sun is tinting the town’s lakefront houses
in ginger, ochre, yellow and auburn: it is
almost exactly the same view Emperor
Franz Joseph would have enjoyed, and the
very essence of sommerfrische.Schloss Ort is one of the first
sights seen when sailing out
of Gmunden – the castle sits
on its own tiny island in the
Traunsee. BELOW Manuela
Kiesenhofer sails the seven-
mile-long lake