Still Waters

The lakes and gorges of Salzburgerland are calming on the eye — but hold potential for adventure too

- Ben Lerwill

It’s an hour before midday on Lake Fuschl. A bright blue damselfly comes to rest on the wooden gunwale of the boat I’m in. The morning is hot and still, a day for running your hand in the water and watching sunlight shimmer on the surface. The lake is 2.5 miles long and 500 metres wide, but ours is one of just three boats astir. Both the others have solo occupants — local fishermen, waiting for trout. They’re sitting back, feet up. They don’t look especially hassled.

The lake itself is an improbable shade of aquamarine, a by-product of the plankton that inhabit the water. It creates a colour scheme more redolent of Antigua than Austria, although when you look up, the heavy pine woods and soft, hawk-flown hills are European through and through. The boat’s skipper points to a distant, sandy section of the shoreline. “Our naturists’ beach,” he says, matter-of-factly, sipping a coffee. I can make out five or six people at the water’s edge. They don’t look especially hassled either.

For all its adrenalin-kick potential, the Salzburgerland region is ostensibly somewhere deeply calming. This is partly to do with its rippled green carpet of peaks and crests — a landscape that could have been designed from on high purely to look good in brochures — but also down to an abundance of water.

Water is everywhere you look here. Lakes and rivers, gorges and waterfalls, streams and fountains. Most of the locals you meet have lived here all their lives, and their houses and villages are congregated close to water, where nature’s gifts are fresh and the sense of space is that much greater. The mountaintops might hog the billboards, but life here is lived around the lakes.

WINDSURFING LAKE ZELL