This one claims to suit everyone – with varied skiing, excellent ski schools and childcare, and buzzing après-ski. But it also has one of the most notorious pistes in Austria. Harakiri is a black run that drops down the back of the craggy Knorren mountain, immediately above the town. Indeed named after the notorious Japanese form of ritual suicide, Harakiri's maximum pitch is 78 degrees – which is a test of nerves for most skiers and snowboarders.
Although Mayrhofen is the biggest, it is just one of the resorts of the Zillertal valley – which consists of a handful of villages and offers a total of 515 km (320 mi.) of pistes as well as 179 lifts. You might think this would make the Zillertal one of the world’s top ski regions, but the terrain is split into lots of different sectors and is accessed from completely separate villages – and the skiing is not linked. You can reach all the areas on the narrow-gauge valley railway, and you can choose between lift passes that cover one or all of them.
One of the resorts, which is under half an hour away, is Hintertux, which has a glacier with a top lift going up to 3,250 metres (10,663 feet). It offers the steepest terrain of all the Austrian glaciers, and it is the only European glacier that’s open for skiing every single day of the year. It’s an ideal destination if the snow isn’t up to scratch in Mayrhofen, or you want a day of doing something completely different.
Gateways: Innsbruck (one hour) and Munich (two hours).
Read more in our post 7 of Austria´s Best Winter Resorts.
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