Hallstatt Travel Guide

Above the top station of the Dachstein glacier cable car, a stone chapel built in 1908 stands on scree at roughly 2,830 metres, among the highest church buildings in Austria. From the Hunerkogel station on the Ramsau side it is a twenty-minute walk along a ridge with views sweeping over the Hallstatt lake country and the shrinking glaciers. Built of local rock, the chapel holds little more than a few pews and a simple wooden altar, yet both mountaineers and cable-car day-trippers pause here — a stone embodiment of silence on the roof of the Alps.

At 2,995 metres, Hoher Dachstein straddles Upper Austria and Styria as the second-highest summit of the Northern Limestone Alps and the core of the Hallstatt-Dachstein World Heritage landscape. The name means “roof stone”, and from the Hunerkogel cable-car station it feels earned: Lake Hallstatt shrinks to a silver mirror below, while grey moraines mark how far the glaciers have retreated. Reaching the true summit demands gear and a guide, so most visitors settle for the Skywalk platform and suspension bridge — half a day is plenty.

Krippenstein, at 2,108 metres, is the easiest “balcony” over Lake Hallstatt — two cable-car stages from Obertraun put you on top. The Heilbronner Circular Trail sets out from the summit station for a roughly twelve-kilometre lap along cliff edges, gathering the Dachstein glaciers, the lake below and the Salzkammergut's watery mosaic into one walk. In winter the same lifts serve a cult freeride scene, releasing skiers onto huge tracts of ungroomed terrain above the valleys.

The Giant Ice Cave of Dachstein opens at about 1,350 metres on the Schönbergalm pastures, a steep fifteen-minute walk from the cable car's middle station above Obertraun, and ranks among the largest ice caves in the Alps. Sub-zero temperatures persist year-round: curtains, towers and frozen waterfalls glow blue under the lights, and several domed chambers take their names from the legend of King Arthur, the ice columns of the Arthur Dome imagined as petrified knights. The guided round trip lasts about an hour, and even in August a warm jacket is mandatory.

The “5fingers” is a viewing platform hanging off the Krippenstein cliffs: five finger-shaped steel decks reach out over a vertical drop of several hundred metres, with Lake Hallstatt spread beyond. Each finger has its own twist — one carries a glass floor, another a baroque picture-frame railing, a third simply a hole in the deck that keeps visitors well back from the edge. Twenty flat minutes from the cable car's top station, it is one of Austria's most photographed structures, especially when morning mist floats over the lake village below.

The Sedlec Ossuary in Kutna Hora is a world-famous, striking and unique site - a small chapel decorated with the bones of tens of thousands of people, one of the world's most unusual and unforgettable religious places, and Kutna Hora's most famous sight. The ossuary lies beneath a Gothic cemetery church in Sedlec on the edge of town. Its bones trace to history: in the 13th century the abbot brought soil from the Holy Land and scattered it here, making it a revered burial ground; later plague and war buried tens of thousands. To house the cleared bones, people artfully arranged them into astounding decorations - about 40,000 to 70,000 skeletons form a giant chandelier made entirely of human bones (said to use every bone of the body), plus pyramids, a coat of arms and crosses. This is not for shock but a solemn meditation on death, faith and the equality of life. Visit with reverence; protecting its solemnity is every visitor's duty.