Naturpark Karwendel

About this audio guide

This guide to Naturpark Karwendel near Innsbruck follows the wood, not the wildlife: for seven hundred years, the valleys inside Austria's largest nature park were logged to feed the Saline Hall, the salt works that was once the single richest source of income for the rulers of Tyrol. You will hear how a count's cheap purchase of a small salt town turned into a fortune, how much timber the boiling pans devoured every year, and why the crown eventually had to police its own forests before it ran out of trees to burn.