Hallstatt

This is the longest worked salt mine on earth, and wooden slides carry visitors down between levels. The long one measures 64 metres and a dial prints the speed of each descent.

A steel deck reaches into open air from a cliff 350 metres above the lake. The floor is open work, so the village roofs and the boats show straight through it.

Because the graveyard was small, bones were lifted after about 10 years, washed, and the skulls painted with a name and flowers. More than 1200 skulls remain and 610 of them carry that painting.

The railway halt sits on the far shore, so the boat crosses to meet each train. The view of the village from the water is the angle that fills most photographs.

Painted timber houses ring a trinity column set in the middle. The square is so small that a single turn around it takes time once people gather.

The cave lies 1500 metres up the mountain, so ice covers the inside through the deepest part of summer. Blue lamps pick out the layers frozen into the walls.

Five iron walkways stick out like fingers, each pointing a different way. One carries a glass floor, another is cut open like a picture frame.

A walk of about 40 minutes into the valley reaches water dropping in three stages. Snowmelt brings the heaviest flow, and the spray then carries onto the path.

Some 1500 iron age burials came out of this slope, and a whole period of European archaeology is named after it. The dig is reopened here each summer.

A wooden stair recovered inside the tunnels was built from timber felled in 1344 BC. Salt cured the wood, so the joints cut without a single nail survive intact.

The village museum walks through 7 thousand years of salt mining in order. Bronze vessels and jewellery from Iron Age graves take the centre. Hallstatt is tiny and has little else under a roof, so rainy days crowd its doorway.

A neo-Gothic church raised on the shore in 1863, its needle spire the one on every postcard. Miners kept their Protestant faith in secret through the Counter-Reformation, so a congregation survived. Inside it is plain, a few minutes' look.

The Catholic parish church on the slope above the village, reached by a roofed wooden stair. Inside, a late Gothic winged altar carved by Lienhart Astl opens out in gold. The Bone House sits in a corner of its graveyard, and is seen on the same climb.

From a bend of road at the village's northern tip, the Lutheran spire, lake and houses stack into one frame. The narrow lane passes residents' homes, and the photo queue spills onto the road. On a calm morning the village doubles in the lake.

A bus into the valley west of Hallstatt reaches a lake where the Dachstein glacier is mirrored whole. A level shoreline loop needs roughly an hour on foot. Mornings bring glassy water, before the daytime breezes ruffle it.

A limestone cave at Obertraun where a stream still flows; after rain its roar gave the cave its name. It sits below the ice cave, so the climb to the entrance is brief. Passages stay damp underfoot, so firm soles help.

Emperor Franz Joseph's summer villa, a train ride from Hallstatt. The desk where he signed the declaration of war on Serbia in 1914 remains in his study. The interior is seen only with a guide.

A grassy shore at Obertraun, at the far southern tip of the lake, with Hallstatt small beneath its cliff across the water. Summer brings plenty of swimmers, and a pebble bed keeps the water clear. It is calmer than Hallstatt, so many people stay on this side.