Lermoos is a municipality with 1143 inhabitants (as of January 1, 2020) in the Reutte district in Tyrol (Austria). The community is located in the judicial district of Reutte. Lermoos is located on the western edge of the basin landscape of the Lermooser Moos through which the Loisach flows, a former swamp landscape, between the Lechtal Alps, the Ammergau Alps and the Wetterstein Mountains. The municipal area is 56.4 km², of which almost 10% is settled and 60% is forest.
Lermoos is one of the oldest places in Ausserfern. It
is first documented as "Larinmos" in the years 1073-1078 in a record
of the Freising Monastery of the border in the Werdenfelser Land. At
that time Lermoos belonged to the diocese of Brixen.
As early
as the first century, a Roman road, the Via Claudia Augusta, ran
through what is now the municipality. Due to its location on the
important connection from northern Italy and from the salt deposits
in Hall over the Fernpass to Bavaria and Swabia, Lermoos became
economically very important in the Middle Ages. There was an
intermediate warehouse there around 1500, and as early as 1318 a
"new salt barn" was mentioned, which was replaced by a new building
in 1678. This was dismantled in 2007 and partially rebuilt on the
grounds of the Ehrenberg Castle World in the vicinity of the
Ehrenberger Klause.
Further evidence of the town's heyday at
that time is the establishment of its own post office at the
beginning of the 16th century and a hospital and hospice in 1558.
With the expansion of the traffic routes over the Arlberg in the
nineteenth century, the heyday of Lermoos came to an end, which was
also reflected in the decline in the number of inhabitants: while
the community still had 818 inhabitants in 1832, the number fell to
564 by 1900.
With the strong growth of tourism after the
Second World War, it became the most important tourist community in
Ausserfern. In the meantime (as of 2019), the statistics for Lermoos
show over 600,000 overnight stays per year, which are roughly
equally divided between the summer and winter seasons. Lermoos is
part of the Tiroler Zugspitz-Arena Tourist Association and has its
own ski area, Grubigstein, which is operated by the Langes mountain
railways.
The origin of the place name is not completely
clear; the name Larinmoos used in the first documentary mention
could be derived from Lärchenmoos.