Mayrhofen

Mayrhofen is the biggest town in the Zillertal and its natural capital: a proper working place of 4,000 people at 630 m, with a long main street, a lot of hotels and a young, noisy crowd in winter. Two mountains rise straight from the town, reached by separate lifts. The Penken is the main event — a broad, busy area linked over the ridge to Finkenberg and to the Tux valley — and the Ahorn is a gentler, sunnier plateau reached by Austria's largest cable car.

The Penken is home to the Harakiri, a groomed piste with a gradient of 78 per cent that is the steepest in Austria; it is short, often icy, and skied mainly so people can say they have. More relevant to most visitors is the Penken Park, one of the best-regarded terrain parks in Europe, and the fact that the Zillertal Superskipass covers every lift in the valley, from the Hintertux glacier to the Zillertal Arena, for around 500 km of piste in total.

Mayrhofen's weakness is the lack of a piste back to town: you ride the gondola down from the Penken at the end of the day like everyone else, and the queue for it can be long. In April the town hosts Snowbombing, a week-long music festival that is either the reason you are here or the reason to book a different week.