Damüls-Mellau

Damüls is a small farming village at 1,430 m in the Bregenzerwald, the rolling, wooded district of Vorarlberg behind Lake Constance, and it holds a title no marketing department could invent: on the strength of decades of measurements it has been called the snowiest village in the world, with an average of around nine metres a winter. The reason is geography — it sits in the first line of hills that the wet north-westerly storms hit after crossing Germany, and they drop their load here.

Since a gondola link opened in 2009, Damüls shares its mountain with Mellau, a lower village at 700 m on the far side, forming an area of around 110 km of piste rising to about 2,050 m. The slopes are moderate, open above Damüls and wooded above Mellau, with a good balance of blues and reds and a few short steep pitches, and the whole thing has the unhurried feel of a place where most visitors come from a couple of hours away.

That snow record has a flip side: it snows a lot, which means days of poor visibility and, for a village on a high pass road, occasional closures. When the sun comes out afterwards, though, the powder on the open slopes above Damüls is as good as anything in Austria at twice the price.