How Warm Is the Hallstättersee?
The lake's temperature right now from the village gauge, where you can get in, and what the lake's own year of readings shows.
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The lake's temperature right now from the village gauge, where you can get in, and what the lake's own year of readings shows.
Loading the latest information…
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How warm the Hallstättersee actually is right now, read every fifteen minutes at the village gauge in Lahn, plus where you can get in and what the lake's own year looks like. The guidebooks say the lake barely warms up. The gauge is the only thing that knows whether that is true today.
22.9 °C — pleasant
The water is pleasant for an open-water swim right now. Reading from 8 August at 01:00.
From 363days of daily averages at the same gauge — the lake’s record, not a forecast and not a claim about what is normal for the date.
Below 15 °C the water reads as cold: a real shock that saps stamina fast. From 15 °C it’s bracing— swimmable but sharp on entry. From 19 °C it’s pleasantfor an open-water swim, and from 23 °C up it’s warm for an alpine lake. These words describe how the water feels, not whether it is safe to swim. Cold water is a hazard at any of these temperatures, the lake has deep cold layers below the surface reading, and there are no lifeguards outside the managed lidos.
You may swim anywhere — and nothing is supervised
| Spot | Access | What to expect |
|---|---|---|
| Badeinsel Hallstatt | Free | The village's own bathing place, about ten minutes on foot from the Marktplatz by the playground and the P1 car park: a wooden walkway out to a small island with a diving board, a lawn, toilets and a children's playground. The island is not natural — it was built from rock excavated for the tunnel. No grilling. Free. |
| Badeplatz Kessel (the sampled "Freibad Hallstatt – Kesselgraben") | Free | On the lakeside road towards Obertraun beside the P4 car park — a big meadow, a playground and room to spread out, which is why it fills up less than the Badeinsel. This is the spot AGES samples under the name Freibad Hallstatt – Kesselgraben. Free. |
| Seelände, Hallstatt | Free | The shore at Lahn, at the south end of the village — the second of Hallstatt's two officially sampled bathing waters, and the same stretch the gauge above sits on. It is also where the boats come in, so it is the one place on this list where the traffic matters more than the water. |
The Hallstättersee is 8.5 km², up to 125 m deep, and wedged fjord-like between the steep slopes of the Dachstein. The Traun runs straight through it, so cold mountain water is arriving all the time and the lake never warms the way a shallow one does. The reading above is the surface — the warmest layer there is. A metre or two down it is a different lake.
The lake is usually clear because there is little in it to feed algae. What does cloud it is mineral turbidity — fine rock flour washed off the slopes after heavy rain — which is a visibility problem rather than a health one, and clears on its own.
The same gauge also measures the lake's level, and that is what Hallstatt's water-level page reads. Neither number is a warning service: in a flood the word comes from the Upper Austria hydrographic service and the Land warning centre, and in an emergency on the water from 144.
Live water temperature from the Hydrographischer Dienst Oberösterreich — Data: Hydrographischer Dienst Oberösterreich (hydro.ooe.gv.at) / eHYD. Readings are surface measurements at the gauge, published every 15 minutes. Checked 8 August at 01:25.