Walchensee

The Walchensee, with its deep-blue to turquoise shimmering water, is one of the most beautiful and largest mountain lakes in Germany. Framed by the Herzogstand and Jochberg, it is a popular destination for bathing, sailing, windsurfing and diving. From the Herzogstand the view reaches over the lake to the nearby Kochelsee.

Highlights

• Deep-blue to turquoise water
• Local mountains Herzogstand and Jochberg
• Popular for sailing, surfing and diving
• View from the Herzogstand

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Practical info

Background & History

Embedded between wooded mountains south of Munich lies the Walchensee, one of the deepest and largest mountain lakes in Germany. It owes its intense blue and its clear, cool water quality to its altitude and to the meltwater that the glaciers of the last Ice Age left behind when they gouged out the basin. The painter Lovis Corinth was so captivated by this play of colours that in his final years he came again and again to the shore and captured the lake in a famous series of paintings.

The Walchensee made history, however, above all through technology. In the 1920s, between it and the Kochelsee, lying around 200 metres lower, one of the largest high-pressure storage power stations of its time was built, which uses the difference in altitude of the two lakes to generate electricity and is regarded as a pioneering achievement of Bavarian electrification. Thus the lake unites two faces: the quiet natural idyll revered by Romantics and painters, and the early industrial monument that still supplies electricity today. In strong föhn winds the lake turns into a popular area for sailors and surfers, for the surrounding mountains steer the wind to reliable strength. Anyone standing on the shore looks out over a landscape in which art, nature and technology are as inseparably interwoven as at hardly any other lake in the Bavarian Alps.