SkiWelt Wilder Kaiser-Brixental

The SkiWelt is one of the largest linked ski areas in Austria — around 270 km of piste spread over a chain of rounded hills between the Wilder Kaiser massif and the Brixental — but it has no single centre. Söll, Ellmau, Scheffau, Going, Itter, Hopfgarten, Brixen, Westendorf and Kelchsau are nine separate villages on the edges of the area, each with its own gondola up, and the mountain in the middle belongs to all of them.

The terrain is low, rolling and almost entirely blue and red, with pistes winding down through forest to villages at 600–800 m and a high point of just under 2,000 m at the Hohe Salve. That makes it a superb intermediate area and a weak one for experts, and it also makes snow a permanent worry: the SkiWelt runs one of the biggest snowmaking systems in Europe to keep its long valley runs open. Since Westendorf was linked to Kirchberg, the whole thing connects to Kitzbühel on a combined pass.

Söll, the best-known village, has one of the largest floodlit night-skiing areas in Austria, and the villages under the Wilder Kaiser — Ellmau, Going, Scheffau — have the prettiest setting, with the limestone wall of the massif filling the view from every piste.