Kitzbühel & Hahnenkamm

Kitzbühel is one of the best-known and most fashionable ski towns in the Alps. On the Hahnenkamm the Streif is raced each year, the most famous and most feared downhill of the alpine Ski World Cup. The medieval old town with its town houses also makes the place a popular hiking and golf destination in summer.

Highlights

• Hahnenkamm race on the Streif
• Fashionable medieval old town
• Extensive ski and hiking area
• Summer: hiking, golf, mountain railways

Good to know

Practical info

Background & History

Kitzbühel is one of the oldest settlements in Tyrol and owed its first prosperity not to snow but to ore: in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, miners extracted copper and silver from the Schattberg here, and the wealth of these mines laid the foundation for the pretty, colourfully painted old town with its late-Gothic burghers' houses. The mining town later became a winter sports resort of world rank, when pioneers around the turn of the 20th century ventured the first ski runs in the gentle grassy mountains of the Kitzbühel Alps and thereby helped to establish alpine skiing in Austria.

The town was made famous by the Hahnenkamm, on whose dreaded Streif the Hahnenkamm race is held each year, a downhill course whose steep slope, the Mausefalle, and key sections have long belonged to the legend of alpine ski racing and which is regarded as the toughest race in the World Cup. The soft, green peaks around the town reveal their geological origin in the relatively easily weathering rock of the Greywacke Zone, which transforms Kitzbühel in summer into a hiking mosaic of alpine pastures and flower meadows. Thus the town combines, with great matter-of-factness, mining-historical depth, sophisticated flair and sporting toughness, and behind the glittering façade of jet-set tourism the old Tyrolean mountain and farming heritage always shines through.