Hallstatt

Interesting facts

In 1734 miners found a prehistoric man preserved by the salt, a fellow miner killed in a disaster in the 4th century BC.

A wooden staircase from the Bronze Age mine has been tree-ring dated to 1344 BC, and it is now displayed underground in the mine.

Since 1607 a gravity-fed brine pipeline, first made from bored-out tree trunks, has carried salt water about 40 km to Ebensee, where firewood was plentiful.

Iron Age miners hacked heart-shaped grooves into the rock to prise out slabs of salt; two surviving slabs weigh 12 and 42 kilograms.

The salt has preserved the miners' cooking spoons, food scraps and even their excrement, revealing what prehistoric miners ate while working underground.

Bronze Age miners carried salt in leather and wood packs with one shoulder strap and a wooden handle that let them tip out loads effortlessly.

Excavations from 1846 uncovered more than a thousand prehistoric graves above the village, yet the miners' own settlement has never been found.

Before the road arrived, neighbours on the waterfront got about by boat or along a narrow path that ran through the houses' attics.

Every Corpus Christi since 1623, Hallstatt has held a procession on the lake, with the altar carried aboard a traditional flat-bottomed boat.

The Rudolfsturm above the village was built in the 1280s to guard the salt mines during a salt war with the Archbishop of Salzburg.

Why it is worth it

Hallstatt occupies a strip of land that barely exists. On the south-western shore of the Hallstätter See the mountains come down so steeply that the village has had to arrange itself in a thin line between cliff and water: pastel houses built into the slope, church towers standing out over the lake, boathouses at the shoreline. So hemmed in was the place that the first road to it was built only in 1890; before that it was reached on foot or by boat. The view of the waterfront with the mountains rising behind it is one of the most reproduced images of the Alps.

What made the village possible is inside the mountain above it. Hallstatt's salt mine is regarded as the oldest salt mine in the world still in operation, with around seven thousand years of documented history. The finds from its prehistoric graves were so rich and so distinctive that archaeologists named an entire epoch after the place: the Hallstatt culture, the Early Iron Age culture of central Europe, around 800 to 450 BC, associated with early Celtic peoples. The mine and the high valley are reached by the Salzbergbahn funicular, and next to the upper station a viewing platform juts out some 360 metres above the rooftops.

With so little ground to spare, even the graveyard had to economise. For centuries bones were exhumed after a time to make room for new burials and moved into the Beinhaus, the village charnel house, which holds more than 1,200 skulls; around 600 of them are painted with symbols, names and dates. Since 1997 Hallstatt has been part of the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut Cultural Landscape World Heritage Site. Its image travelled so far that a full-scale copy of the village was completed in Huizhou, Guangdong, in 2012.

Getting there

Hallstatt lies about 53 km from Salzburg; Salzburg Airport (SZG) is the nearest airport, about 55 km away in a straight line. The railway station is on the opposite shore of the lake: a small ferry, running since 1881, meets the trains and carries passengers across to the village centre. By road the village is reached along the west shore of the lake.

From the encyclopaedia

Hallstatt is a small town in the Gmunden District of the Austrian state of Upper Austria. Situated between the southwestern shore of Hallstätter See and the steep slopes of the Dachstein massif, the town lies in the Salzkammergut region, on the national road linking Salzburg and Graz.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Hallstatt

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia