🇦🇹 Austria · Salzburg and the Lakes (Salzkammergut)
Zell am See is one of those postcards that sum up the Austrian Alps: a turquoise lake set between mountains, with an old town of narrow streets and a medieval church on the shore, and behind it the snowy peaks reflected in the water. It is a small resort town in the state of Salzburg, in the Pinzgau district, which together with neighbouring Kaprun forms one of the most complete holiday regions in the country, good for summer and winter alike.
What makes Zell am See unique is its combination of water and high mountains. On one side, the Zeller See, ideal for swimming, sailing or walking along the shore; above the town, the panoramic Schmittenhöhe mountain, with 360-degree views over dozens of peaks; and a few kilometres away, the Kitzsteinhorn glacier, which at more than 3,000 metres allows skiing for much of the year and a look at the eternal ice. It is also the gateway to two of Austria's great landmarks: the spectacular Grossglockner alpine road and the Krimml waterfalls, the highest in the country.
This guide covers Zell am See and its surroundings in practical terms: how to get up to the glacier and the Schmittenhöhe, how to organise the great panoramic Grossglockner route (open only from May to October or November), when to visit the Krimml waterfalls and how to make the most of the lake and the Hohe Tauern National Park. A region of grand nature, with the comfort of a well organised resort town as a base.
Zell am See was born around the year 740, when monks sent by the archbishop of Salzburg founded a 'cella' (monastic cell) on the shore of the lake, the 'cella in bisonzio' that gave the place its name and that appears in documents in 743. For centuries, the Pinzgau and its lake were under the rule of the archbishops of Salzburg, and life in the area revolved around mountain farming and mining (copper, silver, zinc) in the neighbouring valleys. The great change came in 1875, when the Salzach valley railway reached Zell am See: the arrival of the train, on 30 July that year, marked the birth of tourism, and the lake went from being a poor corner to 'the pearl of the Salzburg region'. In the 20th century skiing and mountaineering developed; in the 1930s the Grossglockner alpine road was built as a public works project against unemployment, and from the 1960s the Kitzsteinhorn glacier turned Kaprun into a year-round ski centre. The area also lived through a tragedy: the fire on the Kitzsteinhorn funicular, in November 2000, in which 155 people died. 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.
The name says it all: 'Zell' comes from 'cella', the cell or small monastery with which the history of this town began. Around the year 740, on the orders of Archbishop John of Salzburg, monks founded a religious settlement on the shore of the lake that the Latin sources call 'cella in bisonzio' — the cell in the Pinzgau — first documented in the year 743. From that monastic nucleus, in a remote valley among mountains, grew the town we know today.
The place made sense: the lake provided fish and water, the valleys gave pasture, and the pass to the south connected with the Alpine roads. Throughout the Middle Ages, life revolved around mountain farming, livestock and a church that kept growing. The present parish church of St Hippolytus, Romanesque in origin and with a sturdy medieval tower, has its roots in that monastic foundation and is still the most notable historic building in the old town.
From the 12th and 13th centuries onwards, the power of the archbishops of Salzburg, who were both princes of the Church and territorial lords, grew across the whole Pinzgau district. Through inheritances and purchases, the archbishops consolidated their rule, and by about 1228 the Pinzgau was firmly in their hands; in 1480 the various counties in the area passed definitively under Salzburg's government. So, for centuries, Zell am See and its lake were a corner of the extensive ecclesiastical principality of the Salzburg archbishops, far from the great routes of power, with a modest life set to the rhythm of the mountains.
For much of its history, the Pinzgau was a hard, poor land. Life in the high valleys was demanding: long winters, land that was difficult to farm and a subsistence economy. To that picture was added, for centuries, mining, which gave the region one of its few sources of wealth and work.
In the mountains around Zell am See — in areas such as Bruckberg and Thumersbach, and in the neighbouring valleys — seams of copper, sulphur, silver-bearing lead and zinc were worked for centuries. Numerous galleries were driven into the rock in search of these metals, which were traded and processed in the district. Alpine mining was an important activity across the German-speaking world, and the Pinzgau had its share, although it never reached the fame or the scale of the great salt mines of the Salzkammergut or the silver mines of Tyrol.
In time, many of these workings were exhausted or stopped being profitable, and the region went back to depending above all on mountain farming and livestock. As late as the 19th century, Zell am See was described as a modest place, almost a 'poorhouse' according to one chronicler of the time, a small village living on very little in magnificent but difficult surroundings. Nothing suggested that those same surroundings — the lake and the mountains that now seem such a luxury to us — would become, within a few decades, the greatest wealth of the place.
The turning point in the history of Zell am See has an exact date: 30 July 1875, when a train on the Salzach valley railway — the line linking Salzburg with Tyrol — arrived for the first time at Zell am See station. With the locomotive came the modern world too, and with it, tourism. What had for centuries been a remote, poor village was suddenly connected with the great cities of the empire.
The effect was transformative. In the second half of the 19th century, the Alps became fashionable: the European middle class discovered the pleasure of the mountains, of pure air, of swimming in clean lakes and of excursions to the summits. Zell am See, with its mirror-like lake ringed by peaks, had everything it needed to succeed. As early as the 1870s it began to be described as 'the pearl of the Salzburg region'. Hotels, guesthouses and villas were built; the first summer visitors arrived, and later the pioneers of mountaineering and skiing.
The 20th century consolidated that tourist calling. Skiing, which became popular in the Alps at the beginning of the century, found an ideal setting on the slopes of the Schmittenhöhe, and Zell am See gradually became a winter sports resort as well as a summer destination. Cable cars and lifts slowly replaced the long walk of the pioneers, and the town grew at the pace of its guests. Little was left of that 19th-century 'poorhouse': within a few generations, Zell am See became an internationally renowned holiday destination, and the lake and the mountains were transformed into its treasure.
In the 1930s, while Europe was living through the Great Depression and Austria was suffering mass unemployment, a colossal project was undertaken near Zell am See that would change the tourist map of the region: the Grossglockner alpine road. The idea was twofold: to create a great panoramic route that would open the heart of the Hohe Tauern to the public and, at the same time, to give work to thousands of unemployed people in a time of crisis.
Construction began on 30 August 1930 with the first blast. For five years, more than 4,000 workers — most of them men who came from all over Austria to escape unemployment — carved into the mountain in extremely harsh conditions, at high altitude, with brutal winters and limited technical means. The project was driven by the governor of Salzburg, Franz Rehrl, and designed by the young, brilliant engineer Franz Wallack, whose layout of curves and hairpins is still admired as a masterpiece of Alpine engineering.
On 3 August 1935, the Austrian president Wilhelm Miklas opened the road. Its 48 kilometres and its 36 hairpin bends climbed to more than 2,500 metres, taking thousands of visitors for the first time to the foot of the Grossglockner, Austria's highest mountain, and face to face with the great Pasterze glacier. Since then, the Hochalpenstrasse has been one of the country's great attractions and an economic driver for the whole region, including Zell am See, its natural gateway.
Today, that same road is also an observatory of climate change. The Pasterze glacier, which in the years of construction came almost up to where the viewpoint car park is today, has retreated dramatically: visitors have to walk a good way down to touch the ice, and measurements document year after year how the largest glacier in the eastern Alps is shrinking. The same is happening with the Kitzsteinhorn glacier and with the other ice fields of the Hohe Tauern, silent witnesses to the warming of the planet.
A few kilometres from Zell am See, the village of Kaprun wrote two very different chapters of 20th-century Austrian history. The first was a great work of hope. In the mountains above Kaprun, between the 1930s and the 1950s, enormous dams and hydroelectric plants were built: the high mountain reservoirs of the Wasserfallboden and the Mooserboden, fed by glacier meltwater. The project, resumed after the Second World War largely with Marshall Plan aid, became a symbol of the reconstruction and rebirth of Austria: for decades 'Kaprun' was a byword for collective effort and for the future, and its energy powered the country. Today the reservoirs are also a spectacular high mountain excursion.
The second chapter is a tragedy the region remembers with pain and respect. On 11 November 2000, an underground funicular carrying skiers and day trippers to the Kitzsteinhorn glacier caught fire inside its tunnel. The train, which was full, stopped in the lower third of the tunnel shortly after setting off. A faulty heater, installed without authorisation in the cabin, had ignited hydraulic brake oil, and the fire spread with devastating speed. The toxic smoke rose up the tunnel as if up a chimney. Of the people on board, most tried to flee upwards, in the direction of the smoke, and died of smoke inhalation; only twelve, who escaped downwards past the seat of the fire, survived. In all, 155 people died: it was the worst disaster in post-war Austria.
The subsequent trial ended in 2004 with the acquittal of all the accused, a decision that left many families feeling that nobody had taken responsibility; in 2008 an out-of-court compensation settlement was reached for the survivors and the relatives. The funicular was not rebuilt, and access to the glacier is now by cable car. In Kaprun there is a memorial to the victims, many of them foreign, which every anniversary brings together relatives from several countries. It is a real and sombre story from this mountain region, and it deserves to be known with the seriousness it merits.
The Zell am See of the 21st century is one of the most complete holiday regions in the Austrian Alps. Together with Kaprun it forms a two-season destination: in winter, guaranteed skiing thanks to the Kitzsteinhorn glacier and the runs of the Schmittenhöhe; in summer, swimming and sailing on the lake, hiking in the Hohe Tauern National Park, the panoramic Grossglockner route and the Krimml waterfalls. The old monks' cell has turned into a small international resort that welcomes visitors from all over Europe and the world, with a particular presence in recent decades of visitors from the Middle East, drawn by the green and the water of the mountains.
That success also brings tensions. Mass tourism puts pressure on a fragile environment, and the region is debating how to grow without damaging the landscape that sustains it. But the greater challenge comes from the sky: climate change. The glaciers that made the area famous — the Pasterze beneath the Grossglockner, the ice of the Kitzsteinhorn — are visibly retreating, documented by scientists year after year. Glacier skiing, which was for decades one of Kaprun's hallmarks, faces an uncertain future as temperatures rise.
At the same time, the Hohe Tauern National Park, the largest in the Alps, protects an extraordinary natural treasure: glaciers, three-thousand-metre peaks, wild valleys and wildlife that includes marmots, ibex and the reintroduced bearded vulture. Zell am See lives today in that balance between enjoying grand nature and the responsibility of caring for it. Its history — from the humble monastic cell to the pearl of Alpine tourism — is that of a place that learned to make its mountains and its lake its greatest wealth, and that now faces the challenge of preserving them for those who come after.