One of Austria's best-loved summer playgrounds is in Carinthia, the country's southernmost pro-vince. Our Doug Linton has just spent a few days in the area scouting good hotels and restaurants.

By Doug Linton

Lake Wörthersee

Just west of Klagenfurt, in the Austrian province of Carinthia, sits the Wörthersee, a beautiful 17-kilometer-long lake. It's warm waters, surrounding greenery, and views of snow-capped mountains have soothed and inspired European vacationers for decades. Composers, especially, seem attracted to the lake. Brahms wrote his 2nd Symphony while summering here in the 1870s. Gustav Mahler composed five symphonies in just seven summers on the lake, as well as his Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children (OK, so inspiration is not always cheery). Alban Berg, too, owned a cottage nearby, where he worked on his racy opera, Lulu, as well as his twelve-tone violin concerto.

Great composers weren't the only ones to gather around the lake during the autumn of the Habsburg empire. By the end of the 19th century, the Wörthersee blossomed as a summer resort for Austria's rich and powerful, who flocked to the lake to enjoy the summer sun and the warm, swimmable lake water. They snapped up lakeside property and built luxurious villas and manor homes. With the collapse of the empire, most of these grand homes were sold off and converted to hotels, thereby giving the modern-day visitor a wonderful choice of architecturally-attractive lodgings.

Even today, the Wörthersee continues to attract Austria's idle rich and others who spend their summers boating on the lake or soaking up the sun on the docks. In the evening, they make a splash in the lake's casino or at one of the plentiful nightspots. This all gives the Wörthersee a glitzy beach-town quality that has led some travel writers to label it the St. Tropez of Austria.