Hallstatt is an Austrian village with almost no ground to stand on, squeezed onto a strip of shore between a deep lake and a mountain wall. Everything about the place comes out of that. The houses climb the cliff behind the waterfront on stepped lanes barely wide enough for two, past window boxes and the Mühlbach stream coming down through them. It takes ten minutes to walk end to end, and every few steps another slot of lake opens between the walls. The way to arrive is by water. A small ferry meets each train at the station on the far shore. From the deck the whole village comes at you at once: houses, spire and mountain stacked into a single wall. That waterfront spire holds nearly every picture of Hallstatt, and before any boat has crossed in the morning the lake is glass enough to hand you a second one, upside down.
What paid for all of this is inside the mountain. A steep funicular lifts you to a salt mine that has been worked for some 7,000 years, the oldest in the world. You go in wearing miners' overalls, drop between levels on the long wooden slides the workers use, and cross a still lake of brine underground. Deep in the tunnels stands the oldest wooden staircase in Europe, built around 1344 BC and held sound by the salt. A huge prehistoric cemetery dug out of the slope above gave archaeologists their name for the early Iron Age of Europe. The shortage of ground reaches the dead as well. Up stone steps beside the Catholic church, a small room holds rows of skulls, each labelled with a name and ringed with a painted wreath. The graveyard had no room left to keep anybody in it. The flowers date them: dark ivy and oak for the 1700s, roses and lilies after. The most recent arrived in 1995, a woman who died in 1983 and had asked to be put there.