Austria – Scharding

2011 December

We spent an afternoon in Scharding. It is a picturesque town on the Inn River with Germany sharing the other bank. The shops are all brilliantly coloured, as they were in most of Austria, but this one had a plaza that really had the shops stand out. We found out that in former times these colours had meaning. If one wanted to go to the butcher shop it was the blue building, for example. The tailor was the peach building, etc. Also in former times, the sign hanging from the shop depicted what the shop was all about; a boot for the shoemaker, a mortar and pestal for the pharmacy, etc.

Because the river sometimes floods due to run off from the Alps, there is a gate near the river that records the high water marks from years gone by. Some of the marks were three stories high! Standing there and looking back into the plaza it is not hard to realize that most of the shops and houses have been flooded, the most recent being 2002 – although that was only about 3 meters, with 1954 being at about 10 meters.

Claudia insisted that we have dinner in a fabulous little Italian restaurant, La Cucina. I’m only mentioning it here because I want to remember the name for the next time I go to Scharding. It was excellent!