St. Wolfgang

The town has everything: swimming and hiking in summer, cross-country skiing in winter, and natural feasts for the eye at every turn. Here you’ll find yourself in the Austria of operetta fame. Indeed, St. Wolfgang became known around the world thanks to the inn called the Weisses Rössl, which was built right next to the landing stage in 1878. It featured prominently in a late-19th-century play that achieved fame as an operetta by Ralph Benatzky in 1930. Ironically, the two original playwrights, Gustav Kadelburg and Oskar Blumenthal, had another, now destroyed, Weisses Rössl (along the road from Bad Ischl to Hallstatt) in mind. In the years following World War II, the composers Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti spent summer vacations here, too.