Murnauer Moos

The Murnauer Moos is an enormous wetland southeast of the Staffelsee, a mosaic of raised bog, wet meadows, and transition forest that spreads across the valley floor between the Alps and the lake. It is protected as both a nature reserve and a Ramsar wetland of international importance, and it is genuinely extraordinary in scale and ecological completeness.

Walking paths cross the bog, with boardwalks over the wettest sections. The spring and early summer flora is particularly rich — sundews, bog rosemary, cotton grass, and orchids that grow in no other kind of habitat. The birdlife includes black storks, kingfishers, and wading birds that use the wet meadow areas. Access is from several points on the roads south of the Staffelsee; the tourist office in Murnau has walking maps. The best season is May and June, when the orchids and bog plants are flowering and the crowds are minimal.

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A story
The Murnauer Moos covers 4,200 hectares and is the largest continuous raised bog in Central Europe. It has been accumulating peat since the last ice age — some of the peat layers are over 7,000 years old. The bog is also a major carbon store; draining it for agriculture, as happened to most European bogs in the nineteenth century, was proposed and rejected here, and the landscape you walk through today is one of the few remaining examples of what much of the pre-agricultural Alpine foothills looked like.

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