🇦🇹 Austria · Tyrol and the West
Kitzbühel is, for many people, the most famous ski town in the Alps. This small medieval borough in Austrian Tyrol, with its cobbled streets and pastel-coloured façades, combines centuries of history with the glamour of an international luxury destination like few others. In winter it becomes the world capital of skiing during the legendary Streif race; in summer, its green mountains fill with hikers, cyclists and golfers. Few places bring together so much Alpine tradition and so much shine.
But before it became a byword for the jet set and vertiginous descents, Kitzbühel was a prosperous mining town. It lived for centuries from the copper and silver taken from its mountains, until at the end of the 19th century a local pioneer, Franz Reisch, put on a pair of skis and changed everything. Out of that insight came modern Austrian skiing, one of the oldest clubs in the world and, in time, the Hahnenkamm race, the most feared and prestigious downhill on the circuit.
This guide covers Kitzbühel in a practical, friendly way: how to get there on the Innsbruck–Salzburg railway line, what to see in its medieval centre, how to get up its emblematic mountains, where to swim in summer and what to expect from a town where tavern schnitzel and luxury boutiques live side by side. We also explain why the January Streif brings the skiing world to a halt and how to enjoy Kitzbühel without your wallet suffering too much.
Kitzbühel is a medieval town born of mining: the Celts were already extracting copper from these mountains 3,000 years ago, and in the 16th century the discovery of silver on the Hahnenkamm brought a boom that filled the town with grand houses. First mentioned in 1165 and with a town charter since 1271, Kitzbühel prospered as a mining and trading centre on the route between Tyrol and Salzburg. When mining declined, the town found an unexpected destiny: in 1893, the local hotelier and pioneer Franz Reisch made the first ski descent of the Kitzbüheler Horn, inspired by the accounts of the explorer Fridtjof Nansen. In 1902 Reisch founded the winter sports club that is today the Kitzbüheler Ski Club, one of the oldest in the world, and opened the way to tourism. In 1931 the Hahnenkamm race was run for the first time on the Streif piste, which would become the most famous and most dangerous downhill in world skiing. Since then, Kitzbühel has been both a historic town and a mecca of Alpine sport and luxury. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Alpine heart of Austria: the Tyrol of the old counts and of Maximilian's imperial residence in Innsbruck, the land that rose up with Andreas Hofer in 1809, that was split in two in 1919 — with South Tyrol ceded to Italy — and that was a First World War front in the ice of the Alps, today a mecca of skiing and mountain tourism.
Read the history of Tyrol and the West →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before skis, cable cars or the jet set existed, what gave Kitzbühel life was the metal hidden in its mountains. Celtic peoples were already extracting copper from this part of the Alps some 3,000 years ago, and they traded it along the Alpine routes. That mining vocation, interrupted and taken up again over the centuries, would be the economic engine of the district throughout the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period.
The great leap came in the 16th century. The discovery of important deposits of silver (and copper) in the mountains around the town, above all on the Hahnenkamm and the Schattberg, set off a spectacular mining boom. Kilometres of galleries were dug into the slope of the Hahnenkamm itself in search of silver veins, and the activity drew miners, merchants and capital. Kitzbühel became one of the most prosperous mining towns in Tyrol.
That wealth left a mark that can still be seen: the elegant pastel-fronted merchants' houses in the old town, with their arches and decorated façades, were built by the rich traders and mine owners of that golden age. When, in time, the veins ran out and mining declined, the town kept its beautiful medieval shell but lost its economic engine. It would have to wait until the 19th century for Kitzbühel to find, almost by chance, a new reason for being on the very snow that covered its old mines.
The name of Kitzbühel first appears in documents around 1165, when the settlement was part of the domains of the counts of Bavaria. In 1271, Duke Louis II of Bavaria granted it a town charter (Stadtrecht), a milestone that made it a fully fledged town, with walls, a market and self-government. Its location, in a wide valley on the route linking Tyrol with Salzburg and Bavaria, made it a trading and mining centre of the first order.
For centuries, Kitzbühel swung between the Bavarian and the Tyrolean orbits. In 1504, after the War of the Landshut Succession, the town and its district passed definitively to Tyrol and, with it, to the House of Habsburg, under whose rule it would remain, apart from Napoleonic interruptions, until the end of the empire in 1918. Belonging to Tyrol shaped its identity: an Alpine, Catholic, mountain character that can still be felt in its churches and its traditions.
From those centuries come the great religious monuments of the old town: the parish church of St Andrew (Pfarrkirche St. Andreas), built between 1435 and 1506 and later given a baroque skin; the Church of Our Lady (Liebfrauenkirche), with two superimposed storeys from the 14th and 15th centuries, whose stone tower is one of the emblems of the town; and the small chapel of St Catherine, from the 14th century. Between the decline of mining and the birth of tourism, Kitzbühel was for a long time a quiet farming and trading mountain town, with its past carved in stone but with no inkling yet of the worldwide fame that awaited it.
The modern history of Kitzbühel begins with one man and a pair of skis. Franz Reisch (1863-1920) was a hotelier, mayor and local pioneer, a restless spirit who read with fascination the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen's account of crossing Greenland on skis. Inspired by those pages, Reisch ordered a pair of skis and, in March 1893, made what is considered the first ski descent in the region: he came down from the heights of the Kitzbüheler Horn, to the astonishment of the locals, who could not understand what that man was doing sliding across the snow.
Far from being an isolated eccentricity, that descent was the spark of a revolution. Reisch immediately understood that skiing could transform the economy of his town, and he set about organising excursions and high mountain descents. In 1902 he founded the Wintersportverein Kitzbühel, the winter sports association we know today as the Kitzbüheler Ski Club, one of the oldest ski clubs in the world. The following year he opened the establishment that would become the Grand Hotel, betting on attracting visitors in winter, something unthinkable at the time in an Alpine village.
The bet paid off. In the first decades of the 20th century, Kitzbühel was transformed from a mining town in decline into the cradle of Austrian ski tourism. Pistes were opened, competitions were organised, the first lifts arrived and the town made a name for itself among the pioneers of snow sports in central Europe. Reisch's legacy is enormous: without his insight, neither the Austrian ski industry as we know it nor Kitzbühel's global fame would be likely to exist. The town that had lived from silver learned to live from snow.
If Franz Reisch put Kitzbühel on the skiing map, it was a race that turned it into a legend. In 1931, the Kitzbüheler Ski Club organised the Hahnenkamm race (Hahnenkammrennen) for the first time, a downhill on the slope of the mountain that overlooks the town. The competition has been held almost every January since then and is, after the Swiss Lauberhorn, the second oldest in Alpine skiing, as well as the one that awards one of the most coveted trophies in the sport.
The setting is the Streif, universally considered the most difficult and dangerous downhill piste on the World Cup circuit. Its 3.3 kilometres and 860 metres of drop chain together nightmarish sections: the almost free-falling start, the Mausefalle ('the mousetrap'), a jump with a gradient of close to 85% that throws the racers dozens of metres through the air, the Steilhang, the Hausbergkante… The skiers reach up to 140 km/h, and a single hesitation can end in a brutal crash. That is why winning the Streif is considered one of the greatest honours a skier can aspire to; its winners enter the history of the sport.
Kitzbühel also gave skiing one of its greatest champions: Toni Sailer (1935-2009), born in the town, who at the Cortina d'Ampezzo Olympic Games of 1956 swept all three gold medals (downhill, giant slalom and slalom), becoming a national hero and a symbol of Austrian skiing. The combination of the legendary race, the local champions and the spectacular setting meant that, every January, the skiing world looked to Kitzbühel. The Hahnenkamm weekend fills the town with tens of thousands of fans, sponsors and celebrities, and it is at once the biggest sporting and the biggest social event on the Alpine calendar.
Over the 20th century, Kitzbühel consolidated its transformation into one of the great mountain destinations in Europe. The expansion of the lifts and of the ski area — today the modern KitzSki, with more than 200 km of pistes linking it with Kirchberg and other valleys — made it a magnet for skiers from all over the world. The building of grand hotels, the arrival of international tourism and the fame of the Streif did the rest: the old mining town became a byword for elite skiing and glamorous social life.
Like so many places in Austria, Kitzbühel also lived through the dark years of the century. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938 (the Anschluss) and the Second World War, the country was under Allied occupation until it regained full sovereignty in 1955. Once the post-war years were over, ski tourism took off in the following decades, and Kitzbühel managed to position itself at the very top of the market: not just a place to ski but a luxury destination, with international brand boutiques, fine dining restaurants and an atmosphere that draws celebrities, business people and aristocrats, above all during the race weekend.
Today Kitzbühel lives a difficult but fascinating balance. On the one hand, it is a small Tyrolean town of only a few thousand inhabitants, with its medieval centre, its churches and its Alpine traditions. On the other, it is a global brand of sport and luxury, with prices among the highest in Austria. In summer it reinvents itself as a paradise for hiking, cycling and golf, seeking to spread tourism across the whole year. Between the silver of its old mines, the boldness of Franz Reisch and the vertigo of the Streif, Kitzbühel has managed to reinvent itself again and again without entirely losing the soul of that town among the mountains.