Eibsee is a turquoise lake with wooded islets in it, lying directly under the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain at 2,962 metres. The water is startlingly clear: pale turquoise over white gravel near the shore, deepening to green where the bottom falls away to 35 metres. The islets are mounds of rubble that grew trees, and you can row between them. The basin was scooped out by an ice-age glacier, but the islands are thousands of years younger than the lake that holds them. Roughly 3,700 years ago a colossal slab broke off the Wetterstein walls above and ran ten kilometres down the valley, choking the Loisach beneath blocks, mud and uprooted trees. What came to rest in the water stayed there, and the floor beneath is pitted with 29 hollows.
A shore path of seven and a half kilometres circles the water, an easy two hours, and the Zugspitze swings in and out of view the whole way. The mountain stands to the south, so it is from the northern bank that it falls whole into its own reflection. Three shallow bays of white gravel make this one of the rare alpine lakes people genuinely swim in — a recovery, not a given. Sewage nearly cost the Eibsee its clarity between the war and the mid-1970s, and the water only came back after the drains were rerouted. Today it ranks with the Walchensee and the Königssee among the cleanest lakes in Bavaria. In October the beech and larch turn gold as the first snow reaches the summit. From midwinter the sheet usually freezes and the turquoise vanishes under snow.