Breitachklamm
The Breitach river has been cutting through this limestone and conglomerate for ten thousand years, and the gorge it made — 2.5 kilometres long, walls rising to 150 metres — still has the feel of something the world hasn't quite finished with. Walk the wooden platforms and you're close enough to the water to get a cold spray on your face, close enough to see how the current carves deep green pools before it thunders over the next shelf of rock.
The path runs from the lower entrance at Tiefenbach up through the narrowest sections to the Zwingsteg bridge, where the ravine walls lean in overhead. Two and a half kilometres return, an hour and a half if you take your time.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who come back tend to come back in winter. The torchlight hikes run twice weekly from December through February or March, and the gorge earns them — the water drops, ice formations build on the rock faces, and icicles hang thick from the overhangs. Bring cash if you're entering from the upper Walserschanz side; the gate there doesn't take cards.
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Book directly at the providerHow Breitachklamm came to be
The gorge was known long before anyone could walk through it safely, but the first attempts at public access in the late nineteenth century came to nothing. It was Pastor Johannes Schiebel of Tiefenbach who made it happen — he founded the Breitachklammverein eG, the cooperative that still runs the site today, and pushed through the first blasting on 25 July 1904. The gorge opened to visitors on 4 June 1905.
It has not always stayed open. On 23 September 1995 a rockfall of 50,000 cubic metres dammed the river 30 metres high; when the water broke through the following March it caused around €150,000 in damage. Restoration took close to a decade. The gorge reopened in 2004, and in 2016 the Breitachklammverein acquired the old Walserschanz border house at the upper entrance — a guesthouse on the Austria-Germany boundary that had operated until 2013 — to develop the entrance area.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summer brings cool air deep in the gorge even on hot days above, and high water makes the river loud and impressive. Winter changes the character entirely: the flow slows, ice sculptures and icicles form on the walls, and the torchlight hikes offer a version of the place most visitors never see.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.