Obersee

Behind the far end of the Königssee, across a short neck of moraine, lies a second, smaller lake that feels like the last room of the Alps. The Obersee, "upper lake", fills the floor of a cirque in the Berchtesgaden Alps in the far southeast of Bavaria, its long sides walled by rock faces about a thousand metres high. The Watzmann closes the view to the north; to the south the ground rises gently to the meadows of the Fischunkelalm, behind which the Röthbach waterfall plunges down the 470-metre face of the Röthwand.

The lake is about 1.3 kilometres long and 420 metres wide, covering 57 hectares at an altitude of 613 metres, and is up to 51 metres deep. It has no island and no inflowing river on the surface: the streams from the Röthwand and the neighbouring cliffs sink into the scree of the Fischunkel at the head of the valley and reach the lake underground. Its outflow, the Saletbach, runs about 600 metres north to the Königssee, widening on the way into the tiny Mittersee. A huge rockfall of 1172 left blocks that still lie scattered through the woods and pastures of the Saletalm; it is often named as what split the Obersee from the Königssee, though the two lakes were probably always separate, divided by the moraine wall.

The only building on its shore is the Fischunkelalm, a mountain dairy hut some five centuries old, worked by herdswomen through the summer. All of the lake lies within Berchtesgaden National Park, founded in 1978, and since then it has not been fished; Arctic char and lake trout live in its water.

Getting there

The lake lies in the municipality of Schönau am Königssee, just south of Berchtesgaden, whose station is the nearest railhead. There is no road to the shore: the established approach is by boat along the Königssee to the Salet landing at its southern end, then a short walk over the moraine. Salzburg Airport (SZG) is about 31 km away in a straight line. The Austrian town of Saalfelden is close as the crow flies but lies on the far side of the Steinernes Meer massif.