Austrian town said to have inspired Disney's Frozen plans ticketing system for visitors after growing tired of over 'a million tourists a year'
It is a beautiful lakeside village in the Austrian Alps said to be the inspiration for the kingdom of Arendelle in the film Frozen II.
Yet the local residents of Hallstatt have become so tired of tourists that it is set to impose a ticketing system to limit the number of visitors.
Hallstatt, famous for its idyllic Salzkammergut Mountains backdrop, is to introduce caps on tourists following complaints that the village had become overrun.
The move comes after more than 100 locals blocked an access road last weekend in a desperate attempt to stop the number of tourists visiting.
Mayor Alexander Scheutz told The Times: 'We have really tried a lot in terms of visitor management. But we have reached a point where we're at the end of our possibilities.'
He added: 'As a village, we can only handle half of the tourists who come now.'
The village was awarded Unesco World Heritage status in 1997, but it was the Frozen franchise that boosted its appeal.
Some 10,000 tourists flock to the area in high season - with the village seeing one million visitors annually.
And local group Citizens for Hallstatt said that the number of cars in the area had tripled in the past decade.
While it is not definitely clear how numbers will be managed, one proposal is to sell time-limited tickets, which would cap the numbers that could be in the area at any one time.
Austria's tourism minister, Susanne Kraus-Winkler, has backed a tourist cap.
It is not the first time the area has grown fed up with tourists - particularly those who want selfies to post on Instagram, where more than 33,000 posts are dedicated to its beauty.
In recent months, a fence was erected in its most famous vista point.
The locals who reside in their town say they've had enough of tourists posing up in their quiet streets - and the Mayor decided to literally block the view to stop them.
One resident, Andrea Zimmermann, told the ORF TV network in the country that her home just above the beauty spot was besieged by constant noise - to the point where her health was suffering.
Mayor Alexander Scheutz ordered a 'privacy screen' to be put up blotting out the horizon...but soon whipped it down again after a social media protest.
He told Upper Austrian News afterwards: 'It was just a tryout. We discussed it in the municipal council. But the plan has now been discarded, there will be no such privacy screen in Hallstatt.'
He's not the first to start a war with tourists. In April, a tiny fishing village in Italy launched new anti-tourist measures with €275 fines for loitering in selfie hotspots in an attempt to put an end to 'anarchic chaos'.
The mayor of Portofino introduced a no-loitering rule in two 'red zones' where visitors often take photographs and tourism groups crowd together, The Times reported.