These Austrian Hills Look Too Good to Be True

ST. WOLFGANG, Austria — Take about 80 deep blue lakes, a few hundred or so sheer-sided mountains and a score of dandy-looking villages. Add flowers, a plush green blanket of fields and trees. Splash with sunshine. There’s only one place you could be: the storied Salzkammergut, a 900-square-mile Brigadoon squarely in the heart of Austria.

Here, in Austria’s answer to Switzerland, even the weathered stones bespeak a region rich in lore and legend. From whispers about Nazi gold supposedly hidden in the still and silent waters of Lake Toplitz, to the oft-told tale of St. Wolfgang outwitting the devil, the Salzkammergut’s repository of fables is as rich as its landscapes.

Here, too, is a sportsman’s Shangri-La, with more than 1,000 miles of hiking trails. You’re never more than a yodel away from outdoor excitement. There are lakes for swimming and sailing, mountains for climbing and caves for exploring. There is white-water rafting, leisurely boating and easygoing canoeing.

When Julie Andrews sang in “The Sound of Music” about the hills being alive, she meant the great green peaks of the Salzkammergut. Deep in the pleated folds of these craggy mountains, echter Osterreich aa--authentic Austria--proudly thrives. It’s all here, from lederhosen to leber-knodeln (liver dumplings).

Mountain villagers still dress in traditional styles. On flat-bottomed, gondola-like boats, they ferry cargo across the lakes. Old celebrations still fervently observed include the early January Festival of Three Kings, Fasching (a pre-Lenten carnival) and, most favored of all, Corpus Christi, when fleets of boats join in religious processions on the lakes Hallstatter and Traun.

In smaller villages, it’s easy to stumble upon a first-communion fest, with candle-bearing children dressed in angelic white and brass bands oompah-pahing away in a cobblestoned square ringed with brightly colored Gothic houses.

It’s almost too quaint. Indeed, if there’s anything to dislike about the Salzkammergut, it could be the endless procession of picture-perfect views, too-cute towns and cheery locals. The place seems too idyllic to be real.

The easiest route to the Salzkammergut leads east from touristy Salzburg. In less than an hour, you’ll pass through the Alpine portals guarding this fairy-tale kingdom.

St. Gilgen is the first Salzkammergut town reached in this eastward odyssey (sticklers may say Fuschl is, but it lacks the proper feel). Sadly, because it has the misfortune to be located so near busy Salzburg, the once-charming village has been overrun with condos, tour buses and souvenir shops.

Still, its lakeside cafes, where diners can select live trout from an oversize aquarium, are pleasant spots to pass a few hours before hopping a boat and crossing the lake to St. Wolfgang.

A site of pilgrimages since the Middle Ages, St. Wolfgang continues to draw hordes of visitors to its cafe-studded streets and medieval church. In spite of the crowds, it’s worth a visit. Many come for a meal at the famed White Horse Inn, which lent its name to an operetta still popular with music buffs.

But the town’s real fame lies in the ornately decorated medieval church. Its foundation marks the spot where Wolfgang, a religious hermit living high on the nearby Falkenstein, cast his ax in hopes of putting an end to the devil’s torment. He vowed to build a church on the site and to work many miracles there. Once the church was built, pilgrims came by the thousands. They still do.

To escape at least some of the masses, head to the edge of town and board the steam-driven train wheezing up the side of towering Schafberg Mountain. The windblown summit commands some of the region’s most inspiring vistas.

Back down in St. Gilgen, press on into the Salzkammergut. Here lies variety enough for one and all: the spa towns of Bad Goisern, Bad Aussee and Bad Ischl; secluded villages such as Traunkirchen, Steinbach am Attersee and Gosau, and the bustling little city of Gmunden, once the seat of the salt-works administration and beloved by Franz Schubert and Johannes Brahms.

The farther into the Salzkammergut you venture, the greater your reward. Eventually you reach Altaussee, a watery jewel surrounded by skyscraping expanses of naked gray rock.

A trail circling the little-known but ruggedly handsome lake can be completed in about two hours. All along the way mountains primp and preen in the mirrorlike surface of the lake’s crystalline waters. As always in Austria, the wilderness here is carefully manicured by man, and so is civilized enough to provide strategically placed benches every few hundred yards.

The village itself--once a favored retreat for Sigmund Freud--is composed of dark wooden houses decorated with hand-carved balconies and liberally sprinkled with geranium-sprouting window boxes. Overhead, a flurry of hang gliders dots the sky like confetti.

Nearby is Lake Toplitz, rumored to contain a fortune in hidden Nazi gold. Many have searched its dark bottom and wild shores, but all that’s turned up so far is a few bundles of counterfeit English currency. This buried treasure story inspired the book and subsequent movie “The Salzburg Connection.”

Off in the distance, toward the setting sun, glaciers glisten like sweat on the dark, brooding brow of the Dachstein Massif.

The Dachstein, or roof stone, is a massive limestone fortress more than 9,000 feet high. It forms the Salzkammergut’s southern boundary. Riddled with caves and draped with a trio of glaciers, this high, wild realm is often obscured by swirling mists and rolling cloud banks. Hereabouts, it’s hard to escape “the stone’s” looming presence.

In its shadow lies the little village of Hallstatt, clinging precariously to a narrow shelf poised between a sheer-sided mountain and deep blue lake. Seen from high on the Dachstein, the town looks sadly inconsequential, a sorry smudge on the side of the gargantuan ravine cradling Lake Hallstatt.

But, up close and personal, the village displays its winning charm. Shy houses of wood or stone hide behind cascades of lovingly tended flowers trailing from every balcony and window. The dwellings--painted blue, yellow, red or beige--huddle round a triangular town square, and stair-step up the mountainside.

A network of roller-coasterlike sidewalks links the town’s homes, cafes and two churches. One walkway leads to a spot near the waterfall that slices through a cliff before rushing through town in a narrow stone canal.

So modest is the patch of land underneath the town that there’s not space enough to bury Hallstatt’s dead. Bodies are interred in a church-side cemetery for a decade or so, then the exhumed remains stacked in a charnel house.

Inside that little ossuary--heaped with the neatly piled remains of generations of Hallstatters--gaily decorated skulls seem to sneer in the half-light of a sputtering candle.

After a spooky interlude at the bone bin, nature’s solace beckons from the nearby Echern Valley, where a well-worn trail follows a white-water-flecked stream rushing out of the Dachstein’s heights. A half-hour’s walk ends at a spectacular waterfall.

Experienced hikers can press on toward Dachstein itself, but there’s really no compelling reason to make the climb. In the Salzkammergut, you’re already on top of the world.