Tyrol

Tyrol is Austria’s most mountainous state, and its geography is unusual: North Tyrol and East Tyrol are two separate blocks of territory that share no direct road link within Austria. They were connected through South Tyrol until 1919, when the Treaty of Saint-Germain gave that connecting territory to Italy; getting between them today means a detour through Salzburg or across the Italian border. Innsbruck, on the Inn river, is North Tyrol’s capital and by far the largest town in the state, backed on both sides by the Nordkette ridge of the Karwendel range and the Patscherkofel to the south. Lienz, East Tyrol’s own main town, sits among the Lienzer Dolomiten, a range that looks the part and borrows the name but lies north of the geological line that defines the real Dolomites, and isn’t made of the same rock.

The mountains

By Tyrol’s own count there are 574 summits above 3,000 metres within the state, most of them in the Ötztal, Stubai, Zillertal and Silvretta ranges of North Tyrol and, in East Tyrol, the Venediger, Granatspitze, Glockner and Schober groups. Wildspitze (3,770 m), in the Ötztal Alps, is Austria’s second-highest mountain and the high point of North Tyrol. Grossglockner (3,798 m), the country’s highest, sits on East Tyrol’s border with Carinthia above the village of Kals; its north side carries the Pasterze, Austria’s longest glacier at around 8 kilometres and shrinking every year. Zillertal’s own high point, Hochfeiler, tops out at 3,510 m on the Italian border. Most of this high ground is reached from a handful of named side valleys running south off the Inn: the Ötztal, Pitztal, Paznaun and Stubaital each have their own villages, glaciers and trailheads, and are usually treated as destinations in their own right rather than as approaches to somewhere else.

Huts and long-distance routes

Tyrol’s stretch of the Alpine hut network includes the Stubaier Höhenweg, an eight-hut, roughly 90-kilometre circuit through the Stubai Alps usually walked over a week, and the Adlerweg (Eagle Walk), a long-distance trail built specifically for the state: 24 stages and around 320 kilometres across North Tyrol, with a further nine-stage extension into East Tyrol. The Karwendel Nature Park, immediately north of Innsbruck, is Austria’s largest at over 700 square kilometres and has carried some form of protected status since 1928.

Season and getting there

Winter sports are concentrated in named resort valleys rather than spread evenly across the state: Kitzbühel in the east, the Ötztal and Paznaun in the west, and St. Anton on the Arlberg, which shares its high point, the Valluga (2,809 m), with Vorarlberg. Summer walking runs from roughly June to September at altitude, longer in the valleys. Innsbruck Hauptbahnhof sits on the line over the Brenner Pass into Italy; the Arlberg road and rail tunnels are the route west into Vorarlberg, and the older pass road over the top closes in bad winter weather even when the tunnel below stays open.