Next stop on our seven day trip in Austria was the small town of Hallstatt. We left Vienna early in the morning after breakfast at our hotel and then rented a car that we would use for the remainder of our trip.
We had a dreadful experience at the rental car place at the airport that morning, which I won't get into other than to say that it wasted a good hour of our day for completely unnecessary reasons other than incompetent staff.
It wasn't a great start but we let it go and moved on quickly.
The drive from Vienna was around three hours and my wife ended up driving the whole way while we listened to podcasts in the car. My wife actually drove the entire trip. She wasn't thrilled about it, understandably, but I'm not going to get into that either.
So anyway, the drive was uneventful and we arrived in Hallstatt around 1pm or so.
Hallstatt is a very small town in a very picturesque setting.
It's located on lake Hallstätter See (or Hallstatt Lake in English) and is surrounded on all sides by mountains.
The mountains are small, more like foothills, but nonetheless they are wonderful.
I read somewhere that Hallstatt was the inspiration for the Disney movie Frozen and I could see why right away on our arrival; a quaint and charming little town made up of wooden cottages, located on the water and set within a bowl of mountains. What could be more fairytale inspiring than that?
Parking was a bit of a challenge, as most touristy spots are, but we found a spot pretty quickly actually. It was only by luck that one spot was available in the first location we tried, but it worked out in our favor so we were pretty happy about it. Let's say that it made up for the bad car rental experience.
The town was quite crowded with tourists as you might expect but at no point did I ever feel uncomfortable with the amount of people there. I've experienced worse for sure. Perhaps it was because it was a weekday and not a weekend?
I've read that the town can become overly crowded at times and that at one point locals were protesting against tourists.
Even crazier is that the local churches had to hire bouncers to block tourists from interrupting service. You can see the article here or you can just google it. There are plenty of other news stories about it.
I'm sure that this status changes monthly and that many towns in other places have received this title as well but Hallstatt has been declared the "most Instagrammable city in the world" by some sources. It's quite the honorific but I suppose it's not necessarily a good thing if you live there.
There are under 1000 permanent residents in the town but Hallstatt gets upwards of 10-30 thousand visitors each day! They weren't lying when they said that it gets crowded.
There may have even been talk about exploring options to limit outside visitors to the area.
Luckily it wasn't too extreme during our visit. Like I said, the amount of people for our visit was comfortable so I guess it depends on the day and the season.
The town was very quaint and charming all around and not at all surprising that it was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997.
The little Alpine cottages were brightly colored and traditional looking and the main historic square was lined with beautiful buildings, little shops and nicely decorated restaurants.
I always like seeing flower boxes on balconies and under windows. The more flowers the better!
The promenade along the water was a nice walk that brought us to the edge of town. We found a good spot there to look back at the village and take photos.
The town juts out slightly into the water and creates a sort of semi circle from the edge of town where we were standing.
It made for a really great photo location actually, because you can see pretty much the whole town out on the water, including it's two churches and the mountains in the background.
I'm obviously not the first person to discover the location. It's a famous spot to take photos and you can see plenty of the same when you Google the town. One thing that I didn't do though was walk to the other end of town and take a photo in the opposite direction. That's another nice spot judging by online pictures. Oh well.
We still found plenty of good look out locations while wandering the town and a few panoramic overhead viewpoints (seen throughout the article).
As you can see it wasn't the greatest of days in terms of weather but it was warm everyone was still out enjoying themselves - us included.
But Hallstatt was just a stopover for us on our way to another city. We were headed to the town of Salzburg, where me made our base camp for two nights to give us time to explore the city and the surrounding area. I think we might have spent around 2 hours or so in Hallstatt and I felt like that was plenty of time to see most of what the small village had to offer. For me it didn't seem like a great place to stay for an extended period of time or overnight. Small towns like that tend to be very expensive to stay in and heavy crowds make for limited dining options in the evening. For me it was the type of place to check out for a few hours and than move on to other destinations. Of course if you had more time you could tour the lake itself and maybe take a boat tour, or you could walk to the other end of town and take that extra picture that I mentioned previously. Given its tendency to be overcrowded though, I would recommend visiting in the off season or maybe during the week to avoid weekend crowds, like we did. Then you can experience it's full beauty without all those pesky tourists getting in your way. Good luck!
