St. Anton am Arlberg: the back story

About St. Anton am Arlberg: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Ski Resorts Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

St. Anton calls itself the cradle of Alpine skiing, and the claim is well earned. A railway tunnel, a ski club founded in 1901 and a young local skier with a new technique turned a mountain farming village into one of the great names of winter sport.

The tunnel and the first skis

The Arlberg railway tunnel opened in 1884, and with it came visitors. St. Anton’s tourist office tells how a Norwegian engineer working on the tunnel glided to work on two boards, to the scepticism of the villagers. By the turn of the century the scepticism had gone: in 1901 the Ski Club Arlberg was founded at the Hospiz in St. Christoph, and today it has more than 9,000 members worldwide.

Hannes Schneider and the Arlberg Technique

Hannes Schneider, born in Stuben in 1890, shifted his weight to turn and crouched for speed on rough ground: the Arlberg Technique. In the winter of 1921/22 he founded the ski school in St. Anton, dividing pupils into groups by ability, with set course content and trained instructors, a model copied around the world. He also starred in Arnold Fanck’s mountain films, including Der Weisse Rausch, shot on the Arlberg in 1931, which carried the village’s name to cinemas everywhere.

“If you learn to ski in St. Anton, you can ski anywhere in the world,” as the local saying goes.

Lifts and legends

The Galzigbahn opened in 1937, one of the first cable cars in the Alps, and its 2006 replacement lets you board at ground level from a glass building that glows at night. The Vallugabahn reached 2,811 metres in 1955. St. Anton hosted the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships in 2001, when the Arlberg WellCom served as the press centre, and since 2016 the Flexenbahn has joined it to Lech, Zürs, Warth and Schröcken as Ski Arlberg, Austria’s largest ski area.

The village today

St. Anton is the lively heart of the Arlberg: a pedestrian village street, lifts from the centre and from Nasserein, and après-ski that begins on the run home. St. Christoph, at 1,800 metres on the pass, is quieter and higher; Stuben, where Schneider was born, keeps its small-village character. The museum in Villa Trier, built around 1910, tells the whole story.

Our advice: book lessons early in peak weeks, ski the Valluga on a clear morning, and stop at a hut on run 50 before the last descent rather than at the bottom.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with St. Anton am Arlberg: the back story before you go.