Major sights include the cities of Klagenfurt and Villach and medieval towns like Friesach or Gmünd. Carinthia features numerous monasteries and churches such as the Romanesque Gurk Cathedral or Maria Saal in the Zollfeld plain, the abbeys of St. Paul’s, Ossiach, Millstatt, and Viktring as well as castles and palaces like large-scale Hochosterwitz, Griffen, or Porcia.
Scenic highlights are the main bathing lakes Wörthersee, Millstätter See, Ossiacher See and Faaker See as well as a variety of smaller lakes and ponds. In winter Carinthia offers ski resorts such as the Nassfeld near Hermagor, Gerlitzen mountain, Bad Kleinkirchheim, Flattach, and Heiligenblut at Austria’s highest mountain, the Grossglockner as well as the Hohe Tauern and Nock Mountains national parks for all kind of alpine sports and mountaineering.
Bad Kleinkirchheim is a municipality and spa town in the district of Spittal an der Drau, in Carinthia, Austria.
Nassfeld is a popular sport destination for winter and summer sports which include skiing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing, mountain hiking and offers more than 1000 km of hiking trails. The area has 30 ski lifts: 5 Gondolas, 4 Six-Seater Chairlifts, 4 four-seater chairlifts and 17 tow lifts. The ski resort has over 220 snow machines for creating artificial snow and 110 km of ski tracks. The cable car called Millennium-
Express can lift people to the summit 1919 meters high in less than 15 minutes. The ski resort expands on elevation between 600 and 2000 meters. It has one of Carinthia’s longest runs, Carnia, with 7.6 Kilometers in length. Wörthersee is Carinthia’s largest lake.
Up to today, the Mediterranean climate and the clean, warm waters make Lake Wörth a popular tourist destination in summer. Although the region around the lake has been termed “Austria’s Monte Carlo”, in recent decades tourism around Lake Wörthersee has suffered from tough competition from package holidays to cheaper overseas destinations. As a response a number of local businesses have tried to focus on niches such as high quality tourism, family tourism or golf and horse-riding vacations.
Most tourists visit the Lake in the months of July and August when water temperatures reach 25 °C. A large proportion of visitors return every summer and some own or rent holiday homes along the shore. The vast majority of visitors come from Vienna, northern Germany and the Netherlands. The largest Volkswagen and Audi car show in Europe, the Wörthersee GTi-Treffen (in English, “Wörthersee Meeting” or simply “Wörthersee”), has been held in the lakeside town of Reifnitz (usually in May) every year since 1981.
Mass tourism was decisively promoted by the scenic High Alpine Road (Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße) running from Heiligenblut to Bruck in Salzburg with a branch-off to the Franz-Josefs-Höhe viewpoint. It was built across the historic Hochtor Pass of the Alpine divide between 1930 and 1935 according to plans designed by engineer Franz Wallack. The pass road, Austria’s highest, reaches 2,576 m (8,451 ft), and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the country (second after Schönbrunn Palace) with about 270,000 vehicles and 900,000 visitors every year, about 50 million since its opening.
