Kitzbühel

People mined copper in the hills around Kitzbühel in the late Bronze Age, between about 1100 and 800 BC. The Romans absorbed the area around 15 BC into the province of Noricum, and Bavarian settlers began clearing the forests around 800. The name, Chizbuhel, first appears in a document of the 12th century — Chizzo being a Bavarian clan and Bühel the hill the settlement stood on. Duke Ludwig II of Bavaria granted town rights on 6 June 1271, and walls went up around it.

Kitzbühel prospered as a market town between the Thurn Pass and the Chiemgau, spared by war, so its walls were gradually lowered and their stone used for houses. Silver and copper mining expanded under the Wittelsbach dukes of Landshut, and the town's mining law became important across Bavaria. In 1504, after the Landshut War of Succession, Emperor Maximilian took Kitzbühel, Kufstein and Rattenberg into Tyrol for good. The Counts of Lamberg held it from the late 16th century until the last feudal rights ended in 1840. Napoleon's settlement gave it back to Bavaria in 1805, until the Congress of Vienna.

The Salzburg–Tyrol Railway arrived in 1875. Franz Reisch made the first recorded ski runs on the Kitzbüheler Horn in 1892, the first ski race followed in 1894, and the Hahnenkamm cable car of 1928 brought mass skiing. In the Nazi years leading party figures holidayed here while a local communist resistance group was watched by the Gestapo, and five of its members were arrested and murdered in 1942. Untouched by both world wars, the town grew after 1945 into a resort for the wealthy and famous.

Kitzbühel's identity is bound up with skiing. The Hahnenkamm races, held since 1931 and on the Streif since 1937, are as much a social occasion as a sporting one, televised in Austria since 1959 and followed by ski fans everywhere. The town has produced Olympic medallists — Toni Sailer, Ernst Hinterseer, Anderl Molterer and Christl Haas among them — and its ski school, led for 25 years from 1950 by Karl Koller, dressed its instructors in red caps and red pullovers.

The arts left their mark too. The painter Alfons Walde, whose snow scenes defined the image of the Tyrolean ski town, has a gallery in the town museum and designed the logo for the Hahnenkamm cable car, and the architects Clemens Holzmeister and Lois Welzenbacher built here between the wars. In the 1920s the Tennerhof school taught a young Ian Fleming. The town has since been the setting for the television crime series SOKO Kitzbühel and the Netflix series Kitz.

The sporting calendar runs all year: snow polo in January, an ATP tennis tournament on clay in summer, a historic car rally, cycle races up the Kitzbüheler Horn, ice hockey and Austria's only curling hall. The local dialect is Bavarian, with forms closer to Upper Bavaria than to the neighbouring valleys, although the old pronunciations are fading.

Kitzbühel had about 8,300 residents at the start of 2026, and the town and its neighbours have around 10,000 hotel and guest-house beds. It is the administrative centre of its district, and tourism dominates the economy: with neighbouring Kirchberg, Jochberg and the Thurn Pass it forms one of Austria's largest connected ski areas, with about 170 km of pistes, 500 km of hiking trails and 120 km of mountain-bike routes. Its main lift operator, KitzSki, has repeatedly been named the world's best ski resort company.

Property here ranks among the most expensive in the world. It caters primarily for the high end of the tourist market, and celebrities and the international jet set arrive above all for the Hahnenkamm weekend. Kitzbühel and its neighbours have an unusually high density of guest accommodation.

Life runs on the two seasons. In winter the day revolves around the lifts and the evening around the old town; in summer the town fills with hikers, cyclists and golfers. The mayor, Klaus Winkler of the ÖVP, has held office since 2004.

Kitzbühel eats the food of Tyrol, which leans on dairy, flour and smoked meat. Tiroler Gröstl — fried potatoes, onion and leftover meat, often sausage, in a pan, topped with a fried egg — is the classic inn dish, alongside Speckknödel, bread dumplings studded with cured bacon, and Käsespätzle, soft egg noodles layered with grated cheese and fried onions. Tyrolean speck, a juniper-flavoured ham that is salt-cured and smoked, appears on boards with bread at almost any time of day.

Kaiserschmarrn, a lightly sweetened shredded pancake named after Emperor Franz Joseph, is the classic meal on the mountain, eaten at midday in a hut between runs or walks. Schlutzkrapfen, half-moon pasta filled with potato, meat or spinach and curd, belong to the same old Tyrolean kitchen.

The old town adds a layer of fine dining aimed at the resort's wealthy visitors, and its cafés stay busy through the afternoon. Pale lager is the usual beer, and a fruit schnapps sometimes ends a meal. Up on the Kitzbüheler Horn several mountain inns feed walkers in summer and skiers in winter.