Eibsee

At the foot of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain, the Eibsee spreads in green, glass-clear water dotted with small wooded islands, while the limestone walls of the Wetterstein range rise almost 2,000 metres above its southern shore. It is widely counted among the most beautiful lakes of the Bavarian Alps.

The basin was left behind when the Isar–Loisach glacier withdrew at the end of the last ice age. Much later, between about 1700 and 1400 BC, a vast landslide — some 350 million cubic metres of rock spread over 13 square kilometres — swept across the central and eastern parts of the lake. It reshaped the valley floor and created today's lake with its many hollows and eight islands, which are therefore far younger than the basin they sit in. The lake lies at 973 metres, covers about 177 hectares, is roughly 3.2 km long and reaches a depth of around 35 metres. It has no surface outflow: its water drains away underground. A shallow neck only half a metre deep almost cuts off the north-eastern arm, the Untersee, from the main body of the lake.

The name means "yew lake", after the yew trees that once grew in large numbers around the shore and now survive only in a protected forest nearby. The lake belongs to the municipality of Grainau and is privately owned. The painter Karl Heinisch painted it around 1903.

The Eibsee is also the base of the Seilbahn Zugspitze, the cable car that opened in 2017 and climbs nearly 2,000 metres to the summit; it holds records for the longest free span of any cable car, 3,213 metres, and for the tallest lattice-steel support tower, 127 metres. Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the Alpine resort below, is about 9 km to the northeast.

Getting there

The lake is about 9 km southwest of Garmisch-Partenkirchen and roughly 100 km southwest of Munich. Eibsee has its own station on the Bavarian Zugspitze Railway, which runs from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where trains arrive from Munich. The nearest airport is Innsbruck Airport (INN) in Austria, about 36 km away in a straight line; Memmingen Airport (FMM) is the nearest in Germany, about 81 km away.