Velden am Wörther See

Velden began as a mansio, a staging post on the Roman road between Villach and the Magdalensberg. Its name comes from Velben, meaning willow, and in the Middle Ages the area belonged to the lordship of Hohenwart Castle, held in turn by the counts of Ortenburg and Celje, the Order of Saint George at Millstatt and finally the Habsburgs. In 1545 the Protestant Khevenhüller family acquired the lands, and from 1585 Bartlmä Khevenhüller built a Renaissance manor house by the lake, whose Mannerist portal of 1603 appears on the town's coat of arms. The family lost its estates in the Counter-Reformation, and Velden passed to the counts of Dietrichstein.

Tourism transformed the village. Scheduled boats began on the Wörthersee in 1853 with the paddle steamer Maria-Wörth, the railway along the northern shore arrived in 1864, and in the same year Velden opened its first bathing establishment. The lake quickly became a summer retreat for Vienna's nobility and wealthy middle class, and Velden and Pörtschach grew into its main resorts. On 13 March 1881 a great fire destroyed the old village, and Velden was rebuilt as a resort of villas; it added "am Wörther See" to its name in 1893.

In 1919, during the fighting over southern Carinthia, troops of the new South Slav state advanced as far as Velden and briefly occupied it, which a memorial stone recalls. The town became a market town in 1947. The old manor house, rebuilt in the 1890s, was the setting for the television series Ein Schloß am Wörthersee in the early 1990s. In 2017 the council unanimously imposed a two-year building ban on parts of the shore to keep the lake open to the public and protect the town's historic look.

Velden's character is that of a lake resort with a long memory. The region around the Wörthersee has been called "Austria's Monte Carlo", and the town's villas, many designed by the architect Franz Baumgartner in the first decades of the 20th century, are its most distinctive buildings. The casino, opened in 1922 and taken over in 1934 by the state casino company now called Casinos Austria, moved into a new building in 1989.

Summer is a season of events. Sports car enthusiasts gather in June, street artists perform along the Seecorso every evening in July and August, an international comedy festival has run every September since 2009, and in the same month the town celebrates with the fans of the European Bike Week. Advent weekends bring the Veldener Advent.

The town is mainly Catholic, with a notable Protestant minority, and has a small Carinthian Slovene community: in 2001 they made up about 3 per cent of the population. The Slovene-language poet and translator Andrej Kokot was born in Oberdorf near Köstenberg, within the municipality, and Velden is twinned with Bled, across the border in Slovenia, and with Gemona del Friuli in Italy.

About 9,200 people lived in the municipality at the start of 2026, spread across eight cadastral communities and thirty villages around the western end of the lake. Velden is a legally recognised climatic health resort, and tourism shapes the economy: of more than 2,500 jobs counted in 2011, over 2,000 were in services, led by public and social services, accommodation and restaurants, and retail.

The year is lopsided. Of roughly 500,000 overnight stays a year, more than 100,000 fall in each of July and August, and about half the guests are Austrians. In high summer the Seecorso, the boats and the beaches are crowded from morning to late evening; out of season the town is far quieter and life centres on the villages, the schools and the parish churches. Velden is also home to an international school, the ISC Carinthia.

Growth around the lake is a recurring issue. The spread of large building blocks close to or right on the water led the council to its 2017 building ban, intended to keep free access to the lake for residents and visitors alike.

Velden eats as Carinthia does, and the lake puts fish on many menus. Carinthian cooking relies on grain, dairy and meat; its best-known dish, Kärntner Kasnudeln, are pockets of noodle dough filled with quark and mint, while the smaller Schlickkrapfen mainly have a meat filling. Klachlsuppe is a soup of pig's trotters, and Reindling is a yeast-dough cake filled with cinnamon, sugar, walnuts and raisins.

Restaurants and cafés line the Seecorso and the lanes behind it. Some keep to Kärntner Küche, the traditional Carinthian kitchen, and lake fish appears on lakeside menus. Grain, dairy and meat dishes fill out the menus, with the filled pockets of noodle dough that mark the province's cooking.

As elsewhere in Carinthia, Most, the fresh juice of apples or grapes, is made locally, and after the grape harvest Sturm, a semi-fermented grape juice, appears. In the countryside, Buschenschanken, simple taverns, serve wine with cold platters.