The village is so narrow between the mountain and the lake that there is barely room for a main street. Some houses can only be reached by a path that juts out over the water on wooden poles. In winter, the whole scene is covered in snow, and the reflection of the houses in the perfectly still lake makes it look like a mirror image.
Hallstatt is old — very old. People have lived there for over 7,000 years, making it one of the oldest continuously lived-in settlements in all of Europe. In the nearby mountains, ancient people mined salt, which was incredibly valuable for preserving food. The word 'Hall' in old Celtic languages actually means salt.
Salt was once so precious that it was sometimes called 'white gold'. Hallstatt's salt mines are still there and visitors can go inside them — the tunnels go deep into the mountain and some of the wooden tools used by ancient miners have been found perfectly preserved by the salt itself.
Hallstatt was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The village is so beloved that a company in China actually built a full-size copy of it — buildings, church tower and all — as a tourist attraction. The real Hallstatt residents were quite surprised when they found out.