🇦🇹 Austria · Salzburg and the Lakes (Salzkammergut)
The Salzkammergut is the landscape you picture when you think of Austria: deep green lakes set between mountains, villages with flowers on the balconies, church towers reflected in the water and meadows climbing towards rocky peaks. It is the region of the great Alpine lakes east of Salzburg, and its name — 'the property of the salt chamber' — holds the secret of its history: for centuries it was an almost forbidden imperial territory, worked under the salt monopoly that made the Habsburgs rich.
At the heart of this district, on the shore of the Wolfgangsee, is St. Wolfgang, a fairy-tale village that combines three unmissable things: a pilgrimage church holding the carved altarpiece by Michael Pacher, one of the masterpieces of the European late Gothic; the legendary Weisses Rössl hotel ('The White Horse Inn'), immortalised in one of the most famous operettas of all time; and the steepest rack railway in Austria, which climbs to the summit of the Schafberg to hand you a view of eleven lakes.
This guide covers the Salzkammergut with St. Wolfgang as its base, but with an eye on the whole region: the boat trips on the lakes, Bad Ischl — the spa town where Emperor Franz Joseph spent his summers and where, in July 1914, he signed the declaration of war that lit the fuse of the First World War —, Mondsee with the wedding church from 'The Sound of Music', and the neighbouring lakes of the Attersee and the Traunsee. An area that was European Capital of Culture in 2024 and that rewards travellers who take their time, with a coffee by the water.
The name Salzkammergut — 'the property of the salt chamber' — sums up a thousand years of history. The salt of these mountains, mined since prehistoric times at Hallstatt, turned the region into a closed imperial territory: for centuries it was forbidden to enter or settle without permission, in order to protect the monopoly that filled the Habsburg coffers. St. Wolfgang grew up as a place of pilgrimage around the figure of the holy bishop Wolfgang of Regensburg, and by the end of the 15th century it was one of the most visited shrines in the empire; for its church, the abbot of Mondsee commissioned the Tyrolean master Michael Pacher in 1471 to make a carved altarpiece that remains its greatest treasure. In the 19th century, when the thermal baths made Bad Ischl fashionable, the imperial court chose the Salzkammergut as its summer residence: Franz Joseph and Empress Elisabeth, 'Sisi', spent their summers there, and it was there that the emperor signed the declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. In the last days of the Second World War, the Altaussee salt mine hid thousands of works of art stolen by the Nazis, saved from destruction by a handful of miners. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The land of salt: Hallstatt, which gave its name to Europe's first Iron Age; Salzburg, ruled for centuries by prince-archbishops who grew rich on salt, expelled their Protestants and saw Mozart born; and the imperial Salzkammergut of lakes and mountains, where Franz Joseph declared war in 1914 and where the Nazis hid the art stolen from Europe.
Read the history of Salzburg and the Lakes (Salzkammergut) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
It all begins with salt. Before the postcard lakes, before the emperors and the operettas, what made this region important was a mineral hidden in the mountain. In the heights above Hallstatt, in the heart of the Salzkammergut, salt has been extracted for some 7,000 years, in what is considered the oldest salt mine in the world still in operation. The prehistoric culture that flourished there in the Iron Age was so influential that archaeologists named a whole stage of central European history after the village — the 'Hallstatt period' — covering the 8th to the 5th centuries before Christ.
Salt was 'white gold': essential for preserving food, valuable as currency, capable of enriching whoever controlled its trade. And in these mountains there was plenty of it. Over the centuries, salt extraction was organised under the power of the princes, and from the late Middle Ages it passed into the hands of the Habsburgs, who made it a jealously guarded monopoly.
That is where the region's name comes from. The word 'Salzkammergut' is first documented around 1524, as 'Camerguet des Salzes'. A 'Kammergut' was a direct property of the sovereign — an asset of the prince's 'chamber' — whose proceeds funded his household. The Salzkammergut was, literally, the Habsburgs' salt estate: not just any region, but an imperial domain whose riches went straight into the coffers of the court in Vienna.
That status as imperial property shaped life in the district for centuries. The territory was cut off from the rest of the empire, with controls to prevent salt smuggling and to protect the secrets of the workings. For a long time, settling or even moving around freely in the area without permission was difficult: the salt works were suspicious of outsiders for fear of industrial espionage, and the salt administration — based in Gmunden and, later, answering to the Hofkammer in Vienna — controlled village life. The Salzkammergut was, to a large extent, a closed country within Austria, a world apart governed by salt.
While salt was enriching the princes, another power was growing on the lakeshore: faith. St. Wolfgang owes its name and its origin to a real saint: Wolfgang of Regensburg, a 10th-century bishop who, according to tradition, withdrew to these mountains as a hermit. Legend says he threw his axe from a summit and that where it fell he built, around the year 976, a first chapel. On that spot a shrine dedicated to him grew up.
Devotion to St Wolfgang became enormous. By the end of the 15th century, St. Wolfgang was one of the busiest pilgrimage destinations in the whole German-speaking Christian world, comparable to Aachen: the faithful came from half a continent to pray at the saint's tomb and seek his intercession. That flow of pilgrims, and the donations they brought, gave the small lakeside village a wealth and an importance its size would not otherwise explain.
From that golden age comes the greatest artistic treasure of the Salzkammergut. The church depended on the Benedictine monastery of Mondsee, and in 1471 its abbot, Benedikt Eck, commissioned a monumental altarpiece from the master Michael Pacher, a brilliant artist from Bruneck in South Tyrol who was a master of both sculpture and painting. Pacher worked for almost a decade, until 1479, on a polyptych of carved and gilded wood, with a central shrine depicting the Coronation of the Virgin surrounded by figures of astonishing expressiveness and technique, and with painted wings that open and close according to the liturgical calendar.
Pacher's altarpiece at St. Wolfgang brings together dozens of sculptures and paintings and is the only complete altarpiece by the master that survives: one of the peaks of the late Gothic in central Europe, comparable to the great German altarpieces of the age. That such a jewel is in a village church on the shore of an Alpine lake says a lot about what this shrine came to mean. And as if that were not enough, two centuries later a second, baroque altarpiece was added, the work of Thomas Schwanthaler, who took on the challenge of standing alongside Pacher without hiding him: that is why the church today has two great altarpieces, Gothic and baroque, side by side.
In the 19th century, salt changed its purpose: it stopped preserving food and began to cure bodies. Doctors discovered the therapeutic properties of brine, and Bad Ischl, in the centre of the Salzkammergut, became a fashionable spa. The aristocracy and the middle classes of the whole empire came to take the salt baths, and with them came the court.
The Habsburgs adopted Bad Ischl as their summer residence. It was there that, in 1853, the young Emperor Franz Joseph met and became engaged to his cousin, the Bavarian Elisabeth, the future empress 'Sisi'. As a wedding present they received the Kaiservilla, an elegant villa surrounded by a park, which was extended in the shape of an 'E' in Elisabeth's honour and which was the emperor's summer refuge for more than sixty years. There he hunted, walked and dealt with affairs of state, far from the heat of Vienna. Every summer, Bad Ischl became a kind of secret capital of the empire: where the emperor was, there was power.
And it was precisely in that summer villa that history took one of its most tragic turns. After the assassination of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the diplomatic crisis escalated over the course of a month. Emperor Franz Joseph was spending the summer, as always, in Bad Ischl. And there, at his desk in the west wing of the Kaiservilla, on 28 July 1914 he signed the manifesto 'To My Peoples' and the declaration of war on Serbia. That document, dated in a quiet spa town in the Salzkammergut, lit the fuse of the First World War, the catastrophe that would sweep away millions of people and the Habsburg empire itself.
Today the Kaiservilla can be visited with a guide and still has that desk and the atmosphere of the summer court. It is hard to imagine that in such a peaceful place, among hunting trophies and gardens, the order was signed that changed the 20th century. It is one of the paradoxes that make the Salzkammergut a place where beauty and history cross paths in unexpected ways.
The presence of the court turned the Salzkammergut into a prestigious summer destination. The German word 'Sommerfrische' — the mountain summer holiday to escape the heat — found one of its ideal settings here. Behind the emperor came artists, writers, musicians and a middle class that wanted to breathe the same imperial air. Bad Ischl, St. Wolfgang, Gmunden and the lakeside villages filled up with villas, hotels and cafés.
The railway sped up that transformation. Through the 19th century, the rail lines and the historic Salzkammergut line brought the region closer to Vienna, Salzburg and Linz, and brought waves of summer visitors. In 1893 the Schafbergbahn opened, the picturesque rack railway that climbs from St. Wolfgang to the summit of the Schafberg: a piece of engineering designed for the new mountain tourism, which still runs today with some of its steam locomotives. And from 1873 the steamers plied the Wolfgangsee, among them the 'Kaiser Franz Josef', which is still sailing.
In that atmosphere of elegant summering, the myth that would carry the name of St. Wolfgang around the world was born. In 1896, the authors Oskar Blumenthal and Gustav Kadelburg, staying near Bad Ischl, wrote a comedy set at the Weisses Rössl inn ('The White Horse'), on the lakeshore, telling the story of the head waiter Leopold, in love with his employer Josepha. In 1930, the composer Ralph Benatzky turned it into the operetta 'Im weißen Rößl', which premiered in Berlin to overwhelming success. The work went round the planet, was translated into dozens of languages and had several film versions. Thanks to it, the White Horse Inn and the whole village became a byword for Alpine romance, and St. Wolfgang went from being a pilgrims' shrine to an icon of European tourism.
The 20th century also brought its darkest chapter. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938 (the 'Anschluss'), the Salzkammergut, isolated and mountainous, became a refuge for the regime. Its mountains and its mines offered safe hiding places, and its idyllic landscapes fed the propaganda. In the final stages of the war, the region was part of what the Allies feared might become an 'Alpine redoubt' of Nazi resistance.
But the most extraordinary story happened underground. Between 1943 and 1945, the Altaussee salt mine, at the Styrian end of the district, became the largest secret store of Nazi-looted art in all of Austria. On the orders of Hitler, who dreamed of a great museum in Linz, thousands of works plundered across Europe were hidden in its galleries — at constant temperature and humidity, ideal for preserving paintings. Among them were Michelangelo's 'Madonna of Bruges', the 'Ghent Altarpiece' by the van Eyck brothers, and paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and Vermeer: an immense part of the continent's artistic heritage, hidden in the mountain.
In the last days of the war, in April 1945, the fanatical gauleiter August Eigruber ordered it all destroyed rather than let it fall into Allied hands: he had eight high-powered bombs taken into the mine, disguised in crates labelled 'careful: marble, do not drop'. The destruction of that treasure seemed imminent. It was then that a handful of local miners, together with some of the mine's managers and members of the resistance, risked their lives to prevent it: they took the bombs out of the galleries and set off small controlled explosions that sealed the entrances without damaging the works. Days later, when American troops occupied the area, the Allied officers charged with protecting cultural heritage — the so-called 'Monuments Men' — reopened the tunnels and recovered the works, which were returned to their countries. That feat, told in books and taken to the cinema, is one of the brightest pages amid the horror of the war, and it happened here, in the depths of the Salzkammergut.
With the war over and Austrian sovereignty restored in 1955, the Salzkammergut returned to its calling as a tourist destination, now within reach of a much wider public. And once again it was popular culture that projected its image to the world. In 1965, the film 'The Sound of Music' used the landscapes of Salzburg and the Salzkammergut as its backdrop. The wedding scene of Maria and Baron Georg von Trapp was shot in 1964 in the Basilica of St Michael in Mondsee, whose imposing two-towered façade became world famous. Every year, hundreds of thousands of visitors, above all from the United States and Asia, tour these lakes following in the film's footsteps.
To the myths of the 'white horse' and 'The Sound of Music' was added, in the 21st century, another curious phenomenon: an almost exact replica of the village of Hallstatt, built in China, which multiplied the district's fame and sent the number of Asian visitors soaring, with all the challenges mass tourism brings to such small villages.
The most recent recognition came in 2024, when Bad Ischl and the Salzkammergut were named European Capital of Culture, the first time in history that the title had gone to a rural, mountainous region, with 23 municipalities in Upper Austria and Styria working together. The programme focused, among other things, on the district's history of power and tradition: from salt to the Habsburgs, from Nazism to tourism, in an honest exercise of looking at the past without embellishment.
Today the Salzkammergut lives from that past and from its nature: the lakes for swimming and sailing, the mountains for walking, the villages with their heritage and their imperial cafés. It is one of the best-loved regions in Austria, a place where salt, faith, art, the court and the cinema have left, layer upon layer, a history as rich as its landscapes. And where, with a bit of luck and a clear day, from the summit of the Schafberg you can see at a glance almost all the lakes that wrote it.