Hohe Tauern

Hohe Tauern is the largest protected area in the Alps: 1,856 square kilometres across Salzburg, Tyrol and Carinthia, wrapped around the main crest of the Eastern Alps — 266 peaks over three thousand metres, more than three hundred glaciers, and Austria's highest mountain, the Grossglockner (3,798 m), standing over the Pasterze, the longest glacier in the Eastern Alps. It was assembled the hard way, Land by Land: Carinthia declared its share in 1981, making it Austria's first national park, Salzburg followed in 1983, and Tyrol completed the park in 1992 — all on a promise the three Länder signed at Heiligenblut in 1971, largely to keep the last undammed Tauern valleys out of the reservoir age.

Water is the park's signature. The Krimml falls drop 380 metres in three tiers, the highest cascade in Austria; the Umbal falls stair-step the glacier-fed Isel; meltwater braids grey through every valley head. The sky was restocked deliberately: bearded vultures have been released since 1986, and the Krumltal above Rauris — the "valley of the vultures" — now sees them alongside a summer colony of griffons; ibex were brought back, and golden eagles never left. The park's honesty is its zoning: a core of rock and ice run as strict wilderness (the Sulzbach valleys have been formal IUCN-Ib wilderness since 2017), and an outer zone where alp pastures have been mowed and grazed for a thousand years — these are settled Alps protected, not emptied ones.

The Grossglockner High Alpine Road, engineered in 1935, switchbacks over the park's shoulder to the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, eye to eye with the Pasterze — still the classic first encounter, and now also a lesson, with the ice sunk far below the terraces built for its admirers.

What's worth knowing before you go

Each Land keeps a gateway: Mittersill and its Nationalparkwelten for the Salzburg valleys, Matrei in Osttirol for the Isel side, Heiligenblut with the Haus der Steinböcke under the Glockner. Rail reaches Zell am See and Mittersill, and — through the mountains — Mallnitz, the one gateway with a mainline station of its own. The High Alpine Road opens roughly May to early November; the high trails run dependably snow-free July through September; Krimml thunders best at snowmelt in June.

The connoisseur's path is the Gamsgrubenweg from the Franz-Josefs-Höhe: tunnel galleries along the flank above the Pasterze into the Gamsgrube special protection area, where wind-blown glacial sand builds dunes at 2,500 metres — the strangest habitat in the park.