Zürichsee

This guide to Lake Zurich centers on Ferdinand Keller, a Zurich antiquarian who in 1853 spotted blackened wooden stakes exposed by a record-low water level at Ober-Meilen. From a handful of stumps he imagined an entire lost civilization: villages of huts on stilts, linked by wooden walkways, rising above the water. He called them Pfahlbauten, and his 1860 book sent archaeologists scrambling to lakes from Ireland to Italy, filling museums with paintings of tidy stilt villages floating offshore. Stand at the shoreline and picture Keller crouched in the mud, certain he had found a world nobody else could see.