Explorer Hallstatt

The Hallstatt Skywalk is a 12-metre viewing platform that juts out from the mountainside about 360 metres above Hallstatt, beside the Rudolfsturm, a tower dating from the late 13th century at the top of the salt-mine funicular. It looks over the village rooftops and Lake Hallstatt to the mountains of the Hallstatt-Dachstein/Salzkammergut World Heritage landscape.

The Hallstatt Museum presents finds from the prehistoric salt mines and the Iron Age cemetery above the village, the site that gave the Hallstatt culture its name. Excavations began in 1846 under the mine official Johann Georg Ramsauer. The exhibition traces some 7,000 years of local history from the Stone Age to the present.

The Market Square is the triangular centre of Hallstatt's old village, lined with listed burgher and salt-trade houses with flower-decked balconies. At its lower end stands a Holy Trinity column of Untersberg marble, carved in 1743 by the Salzburg sculptor Josef Anton Pfaffinger and set up in 1744.

The Hallstatt Charnel House lies in the crypt beneath St Michael's Chapel, beside the Catholic parish church above the lake. Because the hillside churchyard could not grow, graves were reopened after about 15 years. Around 2,000 skulls rest here, more than 600 of them painted with names, flowers or crosses, a custom traced to at least the 18th century.

Salzwelten Hallstatt is the show mine in the salt mountain high above Hallstatt, where salt has been mined since at least 1500 BC. A funicular climbs 360 metres to the high valley; guided tours walk about two kilometres through the tunnels, ride a 64-metre miners' slide, pass an underground salt lake and a Bronze Age wooden staircase, and leave on the mine train.