Altaussee

Where it sits. Altaussee is a village of about 1,800 people in the Styrian Salzkammergut, tucked into a high basin roughly 20 kilometres east of Bad Ischl and 80 kilometres from Salzburg. It sits at around 710 metres beside the Altausseer See, a lake of some two square kilometres and about 53 metres deep, fed by karst springs and drained by the Augstbach towards the neighbouring Grundlsee. The scenery is defined by two rock walls: the Loser, at 1,838 metres, rises directly north of the lake with a toll road of tight hairpins climbing its flank to about 1,600 metres, and the Trisselwand, a sheer 1,754-metre limestone face, closes the eastern end and drops almost into the water. Behind them all stands the Dachstein massif to the south, which keeps snow into early summer.

The story behind it. Salt made this valley. The Salzbergwerk Altaussee has been worked since the twelfth century and is still in production, extracting brine from a deposit inside the Sandling mountain, and the salt trade paid for the region's Habsburg-era prosperity. The mine also gave Altaussee its most consequential chapter: from 1943 the Nazi regime used its stable, dry chambers as the principal repository for art looted across Europe and destined for Hitler's planned museum at Linz. Around 6,500 paintings were stored there, including the Ghent Altarpiece and Michelangelo's Bruges Madonna. In the closing days of the war, mine workers and local officials defied an order to destroy the deposit, blowing the entrances shut to seal rather than demolish the chambers, and the collection was recovered intact by the Allied Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives officers in May 1945. The village was also a summer address for the Viennese literary world, with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler and Jakob Wassermann among the regulars.

On screen. Altaussee is the Styrian half of the Austrian sequence in Spectre (2015). The unit worked here in January 2015, alongside the schedule at Obertilliach in East Tyrol and Sölden in the Ötztal, filming ground and aerial plates for the chase in which Bond, flying a stripped Britten-Norman Islander, comes down on a snowbound valley after a convoy of Range Rover Sport SVRs carrying Madeleine Swann. The frozen lake basin, the shore road and the open snowfields under the Loser gave the production the long, low sightlines the sequence needed, since the aircraft flies at ground level for most of it. The Bond connection sits alongside the village's other film association: the wartime salt-mine story was the subject of The Monuments Men (2014), though that production did not shoot in Altaussee itself, which is a distinction worth keeping straight.

What you actually see today. The lake is the centrepiece. A level, largely unpaved circuit of about seven kilometres runs around it, closed to private cars, with the Trisselwand reflected in flat water on still mornings; rowing boats can be hired at the village end and swimming is possible in high summer, though the water rarely gets warm. The salt mine runs guided tours in miners' overalls through the tunnels, including the chamber used as the art repository and an underground chapel and lake. The Loser Panoramastraße climbs behind the village in a series of hairpins to a plateau of karst sinkholes with views over the Dachstein and the Ausseerland lakes, and it serves a small ski area in winter. The Narzissenfest, a daffodil festival with flower-covered boats on the lakes, takes place in late May or early June and is the biggest event of the year in the Ausseerland. Above the village, the path to the Blaa-Alm and on towards the Loser huts is an easy half-day through pasture and larch; more ambitious walkers cross to the Grundlsee, the larger neighbouring lake, or continue to the Toplitzsee, a dark, steep-sided tarn with its own hoard of wartime rumour. The village itself is compact and traditionally built, with a Trachten culture that is worn seriously rather than for tourists, and Ausseer Dirndl and loden are still made locally.

Getting there and timing. The nearest station is Bad Aussee on the Salzkammergut line between Stainach-Irdning and Bad Ischl, with a bus connection covering the last five kilometres. Salzburg is about 90 minutes by road, Vienna roughly three and a half hours. May to October suits walking, with the alpine flowers at their best in late May and the clearest air in September and October. Winter brings modest but dependable snow and quiet cross-country trails, and the basin holds cold air, so temperatures here run several degrees below the surrounding valleys. Autumn fog on the lake in the early morning is a local speciality and burns off by mid-morning.