20 of the best cabins, campsites and hotels in Europe’s mountains, lakes and forests | Europe holidays
In the mountains …
A remote refuge in northern Italy
It’s not easy to get to Rifugio Val di Togno, at 1,317 meters (4,320ft). The dirt road from the nearest town winds for 4 miles through 27 hairpins and is best done in a four-wheel drive, or it’s a solid two-hour hike from the tiny hamlet of Carnale. But as managers Luna Lybeer and Wout Allegaert say: “We offer guests nothing so they can get away from everything.” Although you can hardly describe this beautifully renovated mountain hideout as “nothing”. Every room looks down the valley, whether through a porthole-like round window or huge floor-to-ceiling sliding doors. Breakfast, lunch (or a picnic to take on a hike), afternoon snack, aperitivo and a two-course dinner are included too – delicious vegetarian meals made using produce from the couple’s garden, or foraged nearby, along with homemade kombucha, sourdough and gnocchi.
Doubles from £298 all-inclusive (three-night minimum), rifugiovalditogno.com
An Austrian train station turned B&B
Built in 1910, the old station at Lermoos in Austria’s Tirol had stood empty for years before Johann Ehmann and his wife Cleo Weber bought it in 2019. “We were fascinated by it and contacted Austrian Railways regularly for more than five years asking if it was for sale,” says Ehmann. Now the couple have converted the classic Alpine building at the foot of Zugspitze (Germany’s highest peak) into Lermooser, a design B&B. The eight rooms range from a cosy bunk bed “cabin” to the “team XL” with three single beds and a double in a row. There’s a communal kitchen and a kiosk downstairs for coffee, pastries and homemade soups. The train still stops right outside, and hikes up to the Tuftl Alm viewpoint, and to Seebensee and Drachensee, start right from the door.
Doubles from £106 B&B, lermooser.com
A historic wilderness hotel in Norway
In summer, the sun doesn’t set until 11pm at Røisheim, which sits on the fringes of Jotunheimen national park in southern Norway. That means all the more time to go on blue ice glacier walks and swim in mountain lakes, cycle over the Sognefjellet pass or tackle Galdhøpiggen, Norway’s tallest mountain at 2,469 metres (8,100ft). The first recorded ascent of Galdhøpiggen in 1850 started from Røisheim and the trail still leads from the courtyard of the hotel, although most hikers now choose quicker routes starting from nearby Spiterstulen. Røisheim, a time capsule of a turf-roofed hotel, has been welcoming mountain-lovers since 1858 and many of the rooms are faithfully preserved with timber-clad walls, carved wooden beds and barrel-like tubs.
Doubles from £243 B&B, roisheim.no
Alpine apartments in Bavaria
“We didn’t choose Mittenwald because we wanted to open a hotel, we chose it because we wanted to live somewhere that summer still feels like summer,” says Anne-Sophie Trinkgeld, who recently opened Karls Mittenwald in this pretty small town near the Austrian border with her husband Dario. Mittenwald came out top in their search for the best combination of climate, outdoor activities and accessibility in the Alps – it’s surrounded by mountains but just 40 minutes from Innsbruck. The couple turned the former bakery into 11 thoughtfully designed one- and two-bedroom apartments with a cafe downstairs serving breakfast spreads and homemade cakes. Just the fuel for days spent swimming in the clear waters of Lautersee, cycling to the source of the Isar River through the Karwendel nature park or hiking to Germany’s highest brewery, Karwendelbräu.
Apartments from £145 a night, karls-mittenwald.de
An eco-campsite in the Austrian Tirol
Nearly 1,000 metres (3,280 ft) above sea level, the wide Mieming Sun Plateau is known for its mild microclimate and looping hikes through pine forests and Alpine meadows. Josef Volgger grew up on a farm here, Gerhardhof, which his parents also ran as a small guesthouse. Now Volgger, along with two business partners, has transformed Gerhardhof into a sustainability-minded campsite with grey water recycling, wood-chip heating and solar energy, as well as a naturally filtered swimming pond. You’ll still see Josef’s mother Edith in the bakery, turning out apple strudel, and there is a restaurant for dinners of wiener schnitzel and Käsespätzle (an Alpine mac and cheese).
Pitches from £38 a night, gerhardhof.com
A 500-year-old inn in the Italian Dolomites
Over its five centuries in the South Tirolean town of Lana, the building that now houses 1477 Reichhalter has had many incarnations, including a butcher, bakery, sawmill, stable and tavern. Since 2018 it has been a restaurant with eight bedrooms dressed in mid-century furniture. Room number 4, Helmsdorf, has a balcony with views of the Vigiljoch mountain and Braunsberg Castle (you can borrow a bike to explore further), while Schönmüller is another favourite for its raw plaster walls and tiled stube stove. Downstairs, tables spill on to the pedestrianised street from the restaurant, which dishes up a delicious beef tartare and house salad made with homemade pickled vegetables and whatever’s in season from the kitchen garden at sister hotel Villa Arnica.
Doubles from £170 B&B, 1477reichhalter.com
A Bauhaus guesthouse in Italy’s South Tirol
For 40 years, Johanna Fink ran her family’s Alpine hotel Briol with simple efficiency: sheets air-drying on the line, guests summoned to dinner by cowbell at precisely 7pm. Recently, her children Victoria and Valentin von Klebelsberg have taken over, but Briol remains charmingly the same. The main house was renovated in 1928 by artist Hubert Lanzinger in modernist Bauhaus style – the bedrooms have no heating (there is a hot-water bottle service), guests share a bathroom and there are no TVs, wifi or pictures on the walls. But with views like this, from a mountain meadow high above Barbiano and the Eisack valley, the lack of distraction is very welcome, and hiking trails fan out from the doorstep.
Doubles from £255 half-board, briol.it
By the lake …
A houseboat on a Swedish lake
Stugbaat is a collection of five houseboats that bob around the huge Lake Lelång in Dalsland. Each floats on an aluminium or stainless steel pontoon, and comes with a little motorboat for towing the tiny house to a quiet corner or pootling ashore to explore. On dry land, there are mountains to climb (Egersknatten), berries and chanterelles to forage in the forest, a straw museum in Bengtsfors and a microbrewery in Torrskog. But, really, it’s all about the lake: fish from or dive off the wooden deck that surrounds the cabin or take out the paddleboard included with each booking. You can hire a kayak, check out the floating sauna, or simply drop anchor and do nothing.
From £233 a night (two-night minimum), sleeps 4, stugbaat.se
Back-to-nature cabins in Sweden
Thomas Peterson started with just one log cabin, which he handbuilt on a section of pine and spruce forest on the shores of Lake Eldan in Värmland. Then he built another, and one up in the treetops, and one floating on the water. There are now seven at Naturbyn, all off-grid (no wifi or electricity, just wood-burning stoves and paraffin lamps), all with views of the lake and some with grass roofs dotted with tiny wild strawberries. This being Sweden, there’s a sauna on the lakeshore. Beyond that, borrow a canoe, forage in the forest, watch for elk among the trees, catch a pike for supper or count shooting stars across the inky sky.
Cabins from £160 a night, sleeps 2, naturbyn.se
A waterfront hotel in Jutland
In the heart of the Danish Lake District on the Jutland peninsula, the 19th-century mill town of Silkeborg is known as Denmark’s outdoor capital. Just south of Silkeborg, the waterfront hotel Ny Hattenæs has sat on the forested shore of Brassø Lake since 1896 when it opened as a summer boarding house. It is now open year-round, but summer is still the loveliest time to stay, when days are long, the lake is filled with people swimming, paddleboarding and canoeing, and the terrace at Ny Hattenæs is the perfect place to catch the lingering twilight. Revamped in 2022 by the trio of siblings behind Danish design house Society of Lifestyle, the 14 bedrooms are filled with House Doctor furniture and the bathrooms stocked with Meraki natural products. Room number 7 is the plum pick, with a large balcony overlooking the water.
Doubles from £205 B&B, nyhattenaes.com
A new-gen hotel in Bavaria
Less than an hour’s drive south of Munich, Tegernsee is where city folk flock in the summer to drink in leafy beer gardens, tuck into knödel dumplings in farmhouse restaurants and boat on the lake. Lederhosen and dirndls are still a regular sight in some parts here, but the recently opened hotel Blyb, in the quiet village of Gmund am Tegernsee, is as far from the usual Bavarian cliches as you can get. The villa dates back to 1892, and while it still has original stucco paintings and ornate wooden balconies, they’ve been updated with crisp monochrome decor, a restaurant from the team behind the hip Munich spot Mural, an outdoor yoga deck and events that might include a doner kebab and DJ pop-up or intimate unplugged gigs in the library.
Doubles from £112 room-only, blyb.co
Lakeside cabins in a German biosphere reserve
Berlin school friends Julian Trautwein, Johann Ahlers and Christopher Eilers founded Raus in 2021 with the simple idea of getting city-dwellers like themselves out into nature. They started with a handful of sustainably built cabins near German cities and this year have added their 100th. Lodge am See takes the Raus concept and turns it into a little cabin resort, with 17 huts by a lake in the Unesco Elbe River Landscape Biosphere Reserve, between Berlin and Hamburg. The area is known for its quiet cycle paths, but the water is just as attractive, and there are free paddleboards to borrow, canoe hire nearby and sea eagles, storks and cranes to spot above the wetlands.
Cabins from £126 a night, sleep 2, raus.life
after newsletter promotion
Log cabins in Finland’s vast Lakeland
Finnish Lakeland is Europe’s largest lake district, a watery labyrinth of thousands of lakes, rivers and channels. Its biggest body of water, Lake Saimaa, is like an inland archipelago of nearly 14,000 forest-covered islands. In summer, Finns flock here to lakeside log cabins (known as a mökki), which are an essential part of Finnish culture. On the site of a historic sawmill on Saimaa’s rippling shoreline, Sahanlahti Resort embodies mökki tradition old and new, with timeless red-painted wooden cabins (some with their own saunas) and sleek modern villas that come with wraparound terraces. You may even spot a Saimaa ringed seal, one of the world’s rarest.
Cabins from £93 a night, sleep 4, sahanlahtiresort.fi
An adults-only hideout in the Austrian Alps
Just outside the medieval town of Kitzbühel, Schwarzsee is known for its mineral-rich peat waters (its name means black lake), which are some of the warmest in the Alps, reaching 27C in summer. On a hillside above the lake, Seebichl is another black beauty, its darkly painted wooden balconies spilling over with flowers. Brothers Max and Sebastian Witzmann, whose grandfather bought Seebichl in the 1950s, have created an artsy take on a traditional Alpine hotel, with bright orange Eames chairs rather than classic carved-wood Tirolean ones and contemporary art on the walls instead of antlers. And if Schwarzsee or the heated pool in the garden at Seebichl get too balmy, hike up to the nearby Sintersbach Waterfall for a chillier dip.
Doubles from £170 B&B, hotel-seebichl.at
In the forest …
A-frame cabins in the Slovenian Alps
Famed for its emerald green water, the Savinja river runs from the Rinka Falls at the head of the pristine Logar valley in northern Slovenia down through forested gorges in the Slovenian Alps. Along its banks, Forest Camping Mozirje is a peaceful base for exploring the surrounding Savinja valley. Tents and campervans pitch up in meadows among the trees. For those allergic to pegging in a ground sheet, there are bell tents and A-frame-shaped wooden “forest beds” built from local timber. Campers swap hiking tips and debate rafting versus canyoning over dinner at communal tables in the well-stocked covered kitchen. Afterwards, gather around one of the campfires or kick back in a hammock next to the little outdoor library.
Pitches from £15 plus £14 per adult. Forest Beds from £84, campingmozirje.com
A design hotel in the Black Forest
Germany’s Black Forest (Schwarzwald) is named for the canopy of conifers so dense it blocks out much of the sunlight. It’s a mysterious place, often linked to the dark fairytales of the Brothers Grimm, although the siblings actually collected and wrote their folktales farther north around the city of Kassel. It is easy to imagine Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Riding Hood trotting down the trails, although you’re more likely to encounter German families or a hilltop castle. In the Black Forest town of Waldkirch, famous for the production of church and fairground organs, Artbau Designhotel is a sharply modern riposte to all that fairytale tweeness, with concrete walls and steel tables softened by Moroccan textiles and balconies that look out to the treetops.
Doubles from £115 room-only, artbau-designhotel.de
A forest sauna in Latvia
Deep in a pine forest near the Gauja national park, Ziedlejas is dedicated to the Latvian tradition of pirts – steamy wood-fired bathhouses heated to about 65C. There are three here: the glass pirts beside the swimming pond, the smoke pirts under the grey fir trees and the wool pirts with walls made from sheep’s wool (which releases skin-soothing lanolin). Sessions last around four hours, guided by a pirts master (pirtnieks), who takes guests through the ritual, which includes “whisking” (tapping and brushing) bodies with bundled sticks, herbal scrubs, massage and alternating hot and cold water. The glass cabin bedrooms are just as restorative, looking out across wildflower meadows by day and up to star-filled skies after dark.
Cabins from £110 a night, sleeps 2, ziedlejas.lv
Family-friendly huts and camping in the French Alps
Huttopia has dozens of nature-immersed campsites all over France (and a handful farther afield). There’s a formula – tree-shaded spots often beside lakes and rivers, pre-pitched safari tents if you don’t fancy BYO, a wood-fired pizza restaurant for the evening – and it works, with families returning year after year. Set among pine and fir trees on the banks of the Doron de Bozel river, Huttopia Bozel en Vanoise is at the gateway to the Vanoise national park near the Italian border, which is criss-crossed with hiking trails and home to ibex, marmots and chamois. Closer still is the lake beach – a five-minute walk – or canyoning on the Doron de Bozel; while back at camp kids can join the forest-school-like Petits Trappeurs or hang with new friends at after-dinner magic shows and open-air film screenings.
Nature pitch from £20, Trappeur wood and canvas tent from £146 a night, huttopia.com
Tiny houses in a Swedish forest full of wildlife
The only alarm clock at the four off-grid cabins that make up Inforest, 2½ hours north-east of Gothenburg, is the sound of robins, blackbirds and chaffinches, perhaps joined in their dawn chorus by the odd woodpecker or cuckoo. Each solar-powered tiny house here is a kilometre apart, so your only neighbours will be the roe deer, hares and the odd moose roaming among the hectares of pine, spruce and birch trees. Almost 70% of Sweden is covered in forest and the right of public access, or allemansrätten, means you can walk or bike in every direction. For a little more action, head to the perfectly preserved wooden town of Hjo on the edge of Lake Vättern, just 4 miles away, for a sauna on the harbour or to sail on the steamship Trafik before scurrying back into the woods.
Cabins from £155 a night, sleep 2-4, inforest.se
Modernist treehouses on a farm in Sweden
In the summer of 2022, this family farm in Småland opened five striking suites on stilts among the treetops of the surrounding pine forest. This spring, Trakt Forest Hotel added seven bedrooms in its historic Erik’s House farmstead, the design more rattan headboards, crocheted cushions and views of cows grazing than the angular minimalism and secluded stillness of the treehouses. There is a restaurant, Traktköket, in a nearby log cabin and much of the food is grown on the farm or sourced locally. Outside, there’s a little sauna hut beside the farm pond, with a wood-fired bath squirrelled away deeper in the forest. The team can prepare a fika (coffee break) backpack with coffee, cake and a sandwich to take out on a hike further into the wilderness.
Doubles from £184 B&B, traktforesthotel.com
Some of the areas mentioned above have been affected by wildfires this summer. Please check before booking.
