· Street View & Discovery · 2 min read ·
Grossglockner High Alpine Road: Austria’s Highest Mountain Pass
Panoramic alpine highway winding to 2,504 meters in the High Tauern mountains of Austria. Offering sweeping vistas of glaciers, snowfields, and alpine peaks.
Mountain pass in Austria
The Grossglockner High Alpine Road (in German Großglockner Hochalpenstraße) is the highest surfaced mountain pass road in Austria. It connects Bruck in the state of Salzburg with Heiligenblut in Carinthia via the Fuscher Törl at 2,428 m (7,966 ft) and the Hochtor Pass at 2,504 m (8,215 ft). The road is named after the Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain. Built as a scenic route, a toll is charged.
The road leads from Bruck in the Salzach Valley via the northern toll booth at Ferleiten (near Fusch) with numbered hairpin curves up to Hochtor Pass, with a 1.5 km (0.93 mi) branch-off from Fuscher Törl at 2,428 m (7,966 ft) to the Edelweißspitze viewpoint at 2,571 m (8,435 ft). The scenic route crosses the Alpine divide in a tunnel and runs southwards passing another branch-off which leads to the Glocknerhaus mountain hut and the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe visitors’ centre at 2,369 m (7,772 ft).
The popular overlook was named after a visit by Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria and his consort Elisabeth in 1856. It offers a panoramic view over the Pasterze Glacier, the Grossglockner massif, the Glocknerwand, and the Johannisberg in the northwest. From here, the road runs downhill to the southern toll booth near Heiligenblut.
When, in 1924, a group of Austrian experts presented a plan for a road over the Hochtor (the high pass), they were ridiculed in a time when in Austria, Germany, and Italy there were only 154,000 private automobiles, 92,000 motorcycles, and 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) of long-distance asphalt roads.
