Kitzbühel

Kitzbühel is the most famous name in Austrian skiing and, unusually, a real town: a walled medieval centre of painted facades and cobbled streets that was granted its charter in 1271 and made its money from copper and silver long before anyone put on skis. The Hahnenkamm races in January — above all the Streif downhill, with the near-vertical Mausefalle a few seconds out of the start gate — turn it into a stage for the whole sport for one weekend a year.

The ski area is large, at around 230 km with Kirchberg and Jochberg, and mostly rolling, tree-lined terrain rather than high alpine bowls. The Hahnenkamm sector links along a ridge to Pengelstein and across a spectacular 3S gondola to Jochberg and the Resterhöhe, while the Kitzbüheler Horn on the other side of town is a separate, sunnier mountain with its own lifts.

The honest caveat is altitude: the town is at about 800 m and the pistes top out below 2,000 m. Kitzbühel invests enormously in snowmaking and in storing snow over summer, and it is often among the first non-glacier resorts in the Alps to open — but in a warm winter the lower runs suffer, and the Streif itself is usually only skiable by the public in a tamer, groomed form.