Hohe Tauern National Park
Austria's largest national park covers 1,856 square kilometres across Carinthia, Salzburg, and Tyrol — three provinces, one continuous alpine world. The Grossglockner rises to 3,798 metres at its centre, and the Krimml Falls drop 380 metres at its western edge, the longest waterfall cascade in Europe. Between those two fixed points lies a landscape of glaciers, high passes, ancient alpine huts and around 1,200 kilometres of marked trails.
There are no entrance fees to enter the park itself. You move through it freely, arriving from different sides depending on what you're after — the famous high road from Bruck, the quieter valley heads of East Tyrol, the train into Bad Gastein on the old Tauern Railway.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return tend to pick a different province each time. The Innergschlöss glacier trail in East Tyrol draws them back for the view over the Grossvenediger — one of those valley heads where the mountains close in from three sides. The Jagdhausalm in the Defereggen Valley, with its cluster of the oldest alpine huts in Austria, earns a second or third visit without much persuasion.
How Hohe Tauern National Park came to be
The idea of protecting this landscape predates the park by decades. In 1913, Salzburg parliamentarian August Prinzinger persuaded the conservation association Verein Naturschutzpark to purchase roughly 1,100 hectares in the Amertal and Stubachtal. Five years later, Carinthian forest industrialist Albert Wirth donated more than 4,000 hectares around the Grossglockner to the Austrian Alpine Club — a private act that set the geographic heart of what the park would eventually become.
The political machinery moved more slowly. The governors of Carinthia, Salzburg, and Tyrol signed a joint agreement in 1971, but individual state legislation followed in stages: Carinthia in 1981, Salzburg in 1984, Tyrol in 1992. The IUCN awarded its Category II national park designation to Carinthia in 2001 and to Salzburg and Tyrol in 2006.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are short and changeable at altitude — warm in the valleys through July and August, with afternoon thunderstorms a regular feature above the treeline. Winter closes most high routes and the alpine road from November through April; spring snowmelt can linger well into June at elevation.
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.