Mittenwald, Germany: painted houses and violin-making in the Bavarian Alps

Step off the train at Mittenwald and the town greets you at once: rows of houses washed in colour and covered with Lüftlmalerei, the Bavarian art of painting whole facades with saints, scrolls and trompe-l'oeil architecture, all beneath the grey walls of the Karwendel mountains. A town of around 7,400 people in Upper Bavaria, Mittenwald sits in the Isar valley barely two kilometres from the Austrian border, about 100 kilometres south of Munich and only some 35 kilometres north of Innsbruck.

For more than three centuries the town has been renowned for making violins. The craft was carried home in the late seventeenth century by Matthias Klotz, who had learned it in Italy, and his successors turned Mittenwald into one of Europe's great centres of stringed-instrument making. The Geigenbaumuseum tells that story, and a statue of Klotz stands at the upper market.

A town on the road to Italy

First mentioned in 1096, Mittenwald owed its early wealth to a place on the trade route between Augsburg and Innsbruck, over the Alps toward Italy; for some two hundred years the great Bolzano fair was held here. The town came under the prince-bishops of Freising in the late fourteenth century and passed to Bavaria when their lands were secularised in 1803, a tie still recalled by the crowned head on its coat of arms.

Mountains all around

Mittenwald lies on the edge of the Karwendel Alpine Park, one of the largest nature reserves in the Alps. A chairlift climbs the Kranzberg for views over the painted rooftops, footpaths lead to mountain lakes and the dramatic Leutasch Gorge, and in winter the snow-dusted town turns into something from a storybook. The baroque church of St. Peter and St. Paul, its tower frescoed like the houses below, completes the picture.