Austria’s ‘Frozen’ village plans ticket system to limit tourists

The lakeside village of Hallstatt in the Austrian Alps, famous for its idyllic Salzkammergut Mountains backdrop, is so overrun by tourists that it plans to introduce a ticket system to reduce numbers to a maximum of 5,000 a day from the 10,000 that flock there in high season.

More than a hundred of the fewer than 800 villagers protested against the influx on Sunday by blocking the only access road through a tunnel with placards that read “Radical limits for mass tourism”, “We must protect our living space” and “Please think of our children”.

The mayor, Alexander Scheutz, was among them. “We have really tried a lot in terms of visitor management. But we have reached a point where we’re at the end of our