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Lake

Attersee

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The sun clears a band of cloud above the Attersee at sunrise, seen in telephoto from the Schafberg with the long lake and its shoreline villages far below.
The rising sun breaks through a dark band of cloud and throws an orange path across the Attersee, seen in telephoto from the Schafberg over silhouetted ridges.

Snapshot

The largest lake entirely within Austria, 20 km long and 170 metres deep, and a colour that defies the latitude: a brilliant, luminous blue. Gustav Klimt spent sixteen summers here painting it. Most visitors still pass it by, which is part of the point.

The Story

In 1900, Gustav Klimt came to the Attersee for the first time and kept coming back for sixteen summers. He rented rooms in farmhouses on the eastern shore, brought his painting equipment, and almost never painted people. The lake was enough. The images he made here, flat expanses of water broken only by reflected tree lines and shoreline vegetation, look unlike anything else in his body of work: compressed, abstract, quietly radical. They now hang in the Belvedere and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, but they were made in complete obscurity on the shore of a lake that most of his contemporaries had never heard of.

The Attersee itself is harder to reduce to a single image than the Hallstatter See. There is no famous village wedged against a cliff, no single iconic view. The lake is simply very large, very clear, and very blue in a way that still surprises visitors who arrive expecting a standard alpine green. Its depth, 170 metres at the maximum, and exceptional clarity make it one of the best inland diving sites in Austria, with underwater visibility that can reach 15 metres or more.

A themed walking trail, the Gustav Klimt Themenweg, traces locations around the lake associated with his summer stays. The route connects several villages and requires planning, but rewards it with a genuinely unusual kind of art pilgrimage: following a painter to the exact landscapes he chose.

Visiting

The lake is freely accessible year-round. Public bathing areas are found along both shores; managed beaches charge small summer admission fees. Boat rental, sailing, and diving are all available from Attersee village and other lakeside towns. The Gustav Klimt Themenweg connects locations associated with Klimt’s summers; trailhead information is available at the Attersee tourist office. Reached from Salzburg in approximately 60 to 75 minutes by car. Public transport requires a change at Vocklamarkt on the Salzkammergut railway line.