Steg and the Valünatal are the best-kept secret of Liechtenstein's mountains: a corner of absolute calm at 1,300 metres, a stone's throw from Malbun's busy ski scene yet worlds away from its bustle. Steg is a tiny hamlet on the mountain road; the Valünatal, the side valley that opens beside it, is a haven of meadows, forests and the murmur of the Samina stream, one of those places where time seems to stand still.
In winter, the Valünatal becomes the country's cross-country skiing paradise: kilometres of groomed tracks (the Valünaloipe) wind through the snowy valley, with a floodlit stretch for gliding along at dusk, and a winter path follows the stream among snow-covered trees. In summer, the same valley fills with green and silence, perfect for an unhurried walk. It is the quietest, most contemplative side of Liechtenstein's high mountains.
This guide covers Steg and the Valünatal with a practical, warm eye: what to do in each season, how to get there along the mountain road and its historic tunnel, where to go cross-country skiing or walking, and how to combine this haven with neighbouring Malbun. It is a destination for lovers of nature and calm who are looking for the most peaceful side of the principality, far from the crowds.
Like Malbun, Steg and the Valünatal were for centuries high pastures ('alpen') belonging to the municipality of Triesenberg, used in summer by Walser herders who drove their livestock up from the Rhine valley. The name 'Valüna' and its valley, crossed by the Samina stream, were part of that high-mountain transhumance economy. The big transformation came with the opening of the mountain road linking Vaduz and Malbun: in 1947 the Gnalp-Steg tunnel was inaugurated, a key piece of engineering that made this high area accessible all year round, when it had previously been cut off by snow and rugged terrain. From then on, Steg and the Valünatal became part of the tourist development of Liechtenstein's mountains, specialising in cross-country skiing and quiet walking as a peaceful complement to the Malbun alpine ski resort. The full history of the mountains and the Walser who settled them is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The country's Alpine side: Malbun, the principality's only ski resort, and the neighbouring valley of Steg and the Valünatal, a high-mountain corner for walking, cross-country skiing and breathing in the calm.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
A few minutes from the ski bustle of Malbun, the mountain road skirts a tiny hamlet that hardly anyone talks about, and beside it opens a valley that seems to belong to another time. This is Steg, and this is the Valünatal: the quietest corner of Liechtenstein's mountains, a place where the loudest sound is the Samina stream leaping between the stones, and where in winter all you hear is the whisper of cross-country skis on the snow. If Vaduz is the country's shop window and Malbun its playground, the Valünatal is its corner of silence.
The story of Steg and the Valünatal is not one of great events, castles or princes. It is a humble and deep story: that of generations of herders patiently working the high mountains, and that of a feat of engineering that, in the middle of the 20th century, pulled this valley out of its isolation and opened it to the world. In miniature, it is the same story as all of Liechtenstein: a remote, poor place that modernity transformed without entirely erasing its soul.
Knowing that past helps you walk the Valünatal with different eyes: knowing that those meadows were pastures won from the mountain, that the tunnel you pass through in seconds changed the life of the valley, and that the calm people seek today as a luxury was, for centuries, simply solitude.
For most of their history, Steg and the Valünatal were not a place of permanent settlement but high pastures ('alpen') belonging to the municipality of Triesenberg. And Triesenberg, as its own history tells, was the village founded in the 13th century by the Walser, the Alpine settlers from the Swiss Valais who specialised in settling and working the high lands nobody else wanted.
Every summer, the Walser farmers drove their livestock up from the slopes of Triesenberg and from the Rhine valley to these high pastures —Steg, the Valüna, Malbun— making the most of the mountain grass during the warm season. They built huts, milked, made cheese and cut hay, in an economy of vertical transhumance that set the rhythm of life for centuries. When autumn and the snow arrived, they left the heights and came back down to the valley. The Valünatal was then left deserted, white and silent until the following spring.
That pastoral use shaped the landscape we admire today: the open meadows, the paths and the scattered huts are the legacy of that age-old work. The very name of the valley, Valüna, and that of the stream, Samina, belong to that ancient mountain toponymy. Steg and the Valünatal were, in short, the summer larder of the Walser of Triesenberg: a place of hard, seasonal work, not of leisure or tourism.
The turning point in the history of Steg and the Valünatal came with a feat of engineering. For centuries, getting up to these heights was difficult and, in winter, almost impossible: the rugged terrain and the snow cut the area off from the Rhine valley. That ruled out any development beyond summer grazing. The solution was to bore through the mountain.
In 1947 the Gnalp-Steg tunnel opened, cutting through the rock barrier between the slopes of Triesenberg and the high ground of Steg and Malbun. For the first time, there was permanent, year-round road access to these heights. It was a radical transformation: what had been a remote seasonal pasture became an accessible area, open to cars, to buses and, with them, to tourism. Without that tunnel, neither the ski resort of Malbun nor the cross-country Valünatal would exist as we know them today.
The opening of the road coincided with Liechtenstein's great economic leap after the Second World War, when the country began to grow rich and to look at its mountains as a tourist resource. Steg and the Valünatal became part of that development, but with a role of their own, different from Malbun's: while their neighbour turned to downhill skiing and livelier tourism, Steg and its valley specialised in something calmer and more contemplative, cross-country skiing and gentle hiking, keeping their character as a haven of peace.
That mountain road, with its bends and its tunnel, is today part of the travel experience in itself: the ride on the regular bus from Vaduz, climbing between forests and drops until you come out of the tunnel into the snowy valley, sums up the huge contrast Liechtenstein packs into just a few kilometres. In barely half an hour you go from the Rhine valley, with its banks and factories, to a high-mountain world that until a few generations ago was out of reach for much of the year.
Today's Steg and Valünatal are the gentlest face of mountain tourism in Liechtenstein. In winter, the valley hosts the Valünaloipe, the country's main cross-country ski trail, with some fifteen kilometres of groomed tracks and a floodlit section that lets you glide along after dark, plus a winter path that follows the Samina stream among snow-covered trees. In summer, the same valley fills with green and silence, ideal for easy walks among meadows, forests and mountains. It is a destination that does not compete with the big Alpine resorts but offers exactly the opposite: calm, nature and space.
That quiet calling even has a princely touch: cross-country skiing in the Valünatal has been celebrated as one of the most serene and 'noble' pleasures of the country's mountains, far from vertigo and speed. Steg, with its handful of houses and hotels at 1,300 metres, has become a peaceful base for those who want the mountains without the hustle, combining the silence of the Valünatal with the nearness of Malbun.
Ultimately, the story of Steg and the Valünatal sums up a beautiful paradox of modern Liechtenstein: that of a rich, industrialised, financial country that keeps, half an hour from its capital, a valley where the most valuable things are precisely those that cannot be bought or manufactured: silence, clean air, the murmur of a mountain stream and the calm of a landscape the Walser worked for eight hundred years and that today is enjoyed simply by walking slowly.
