'Make them go': The Austrian town of Hallstat has been swamped by fans of Disney's frozen. Photo / Supplied, Chi Nguyen Phung
'Make them go': The Austrian town of Hallstat has been swamped by fans of Disney's frozen. Photo / Supplied, Chi Nguyen Phung
The tiny village of Hallstatt in Austria is home to just 780 people, who are joined daily by 10,000 tourists.
The source of the influx in tourists to the incredibly photogenic waterfront town has been blamed on TV appearances and its link to the Disney feature animation Frozen.
The lakeside village would appear made for Instagram, where the reflection of the Evangelical church spire reaches up to the Saltzkammergut mountains. It's a picture that appears online in a stunning 616,000 photos tagged #Hallstatt.
While the town has enjoyed a steady stream of tourists, this number has recently snowballed.
The fairytale town of Hallstatt wants to reduce the number of international tourists. Photo / Getty Images
Originally built by Austrian Salt miners, the town's beauty earned it a place in the Unesco world heritage list in 1997.
Though it has been long known for its photo-friendly charm Hallstatt became the focus of an even greater wave of interest following the release of Disney's 2013 film Frozen.
Mayor Alexander Scheutz at the barrier to Hallstatt. Photo / Matthias Röder, Getty Images
The animators based their fictional town of Arendelle on the real world Austrian village, which led to an explosion of visitors. This was particularly pronounced following the release of a sequel to the Disney animation last year, which saw visitor numbers spike five-fold.
With around a million visits a year the town has six times the guests per capita as Venice.
Visitors are everywhere, particularly guests from Korea. Having appeared at the centre of a Korean travel show in 2006 it has become a favourite tourist spot in Europe.
Chinese tourists are equally enamoured with the Austrian town. In 2011 a replica was built in China in the southern province of Guangdong for $940 million, selling fairytale properties.
"They treat us like a movie set," Kayleigh a café manager in the town told The Times. "My mum woke up one day and found some Chinese tourists in her bedroom."
After daily visits spiked from around 2000 to 10000 last year, the township decided it has had enough.
The mayor of the township Alexander Scheutz told visitors to "Stay away" following a fire on the towns waterfront last November.
"It didn't work, they came anyway," he said, complaining that though they want to reduce visitors by 30 per cent "we don't actually have any way of stopping them."
However, with the increased footfall has come some benefits to local residents and business owners.
Savvy Hallstatt residents have started to charge tourists to use their lavatories.
One local waitress who worked in the town has said that the town enjoys a wealth most rural towns can only dream of: "Hotel rooms cost €300-€400. Public toilets costs €1 and 4,000 people use it every day — you do the maths."
