Austria

Austria is alpine across three quarters of its area, but its natural interest does not end with the mountains. Hohe Tauern National Park, the largest in the whole Alpine arc, protects glaciers, waterfalls and high pastures with marmots, ibex, chamois and a dense golden eagle population. Towards the east the landscape changes radically: Lake Neusiedl, on the Hungarian border, is a shallow, brackish steppe lake ringed by alkaline meadows, a fragment of the Pannonian steppe with birdlife not found in the rest of the country, such as avocets, black-winged stilts and great bustards. The riverside forests of the Danube, protected as a national park at the gates of Vienna, keep one of the last unchannelled stretches of river in central Europe, with beavers, white-tailed eagles and flooded galleries. The beech woods of Dürrenstein hold the largest virgin forest left in the Alps.