The market and the mountain
The centre is one long street and a square. On the Marktplatz the Stiftskirche stands on one side and the Bier Adam on the other, which calls itself the oldest beer tavern in the Berchtesgadener Land. The station is ten minutes downhill; the whole town is ten minutes wide, and everything in it is on a slope. Nothing in the centre is more than five minutes from the square.
Above the town the ground goes up fast: the Lockstein, the Kälberstein, then the Jenner and the Watzmann. The Watzmann's middle peak is 2,713 metres, and its east face drops almost 1,800 metres to the valley floor — the highest wall in the Eastern Alps. You do not need to climb anything to see it; it is there from the Marktplatz. From the Jenner, on the other side of the valley, the whole wall is visible at once.
Summer fills the valley with walkers, and the buses to the lake run every half hour. Winter is quieter: the Christmas market sits on the Schlossplatz from the first Advent Sunday to Christmas Eve, and on 5 and 6 December the Buttnmandl walk through the streets in straw, which is worth rearranging an evening for. The Advent market is small, around fifty stalls, and it stays in the old streets instead of spreading.
The lake
The Königssee is 7.2 kilometres long and 190 metres deep, pressed between the Watzmann and the Hagengebirge. It looks like a fjord, and geologically it nearly is one: a glacial trough filled with water that counts among the cleanest in Germany. The steep sides mean there is no shore path — the lake is the road, and always has been. The lake freezes over only in very cold winters, roughly once a decade, and the boats stop when it does.
The boats are electric and have been since July 1909. Eighteen of them run from the jetty at Schönau to St. Bartholomä, and halfway across the boatman plays a trumpet at the echo wall; the answer comes back once, sometimes twice. Private boats and diving are not permitted, which is part of why the water looks the way it does. The hulls were wood until 1998; the last three boats were built on steel.
St. Bartholomä sits on a peninsula under the east face, with a pilgrimage church that got its dome in 1698. From the jetty the Malerwinkel path climbs to the viewpoint every photograph is taken from. The boats carry on to Salet, where a path leads up to the Obersee; the last boat back is the one to organise your day around. The site has been a pilgrimage since the twelfth century, longer than the dome has stood.
Salt, and the rest of the valley
Salt has been mined here since the twelfth century, and the mine is now a show mine. You go in on a small train, come down two miners' slides, and cross the underground Spiegelsee on a raft. It is twelve degrees down there all year, the guided tour lasts an hour, and with changing and queuing it takes two. The first tunnel was driven in 1517, which makes the workings older than the brewery above them.
The Rossfeld road climbs out of the valley in hairpins, and the Jenner cable car goes higher still, with the lake below and the Steinernes Meer on the horizon. In autumn the woods turn before the valley does. The Grassl distillery, which calls itself the oldest Enzian distillery in Germany, is on the edge of town and open to visitors. A signposted tour leads through the distillery and ends in a tasting room, which is the sensible order.
The valley has five communes and one beer, which is a simpler arrangement than most beer regions manage. Berchtesgaden, Schönau, Bischofswiesen, Ramsau and Marktschellenberg all pour the same brewery, and the huts on the alms do too. It makes ordering easy and it makes the one brewery worth understanding. That is why the beer lists in the valley look the same, and why nobody argues about which brewery to drink.