St. Anton am Arlberg

The upper Stanzertal was first recorded around 1275 as Vallis taberna, and the settlement's fortunes followed the traffic over the Arlberg pass. After Tyrol passed to the Habsburgs in 1363, salt, trade goods and troops crossed here, and the villages on both sides flourished. Decline set in after 1450, when the city of Lindau bought the Arlberg pastures and diverted the salt trade; from about 1450 until the new road of 1787 the pass could not be crossed by cart. When railways in the lowlands took the salt traffic again around 1860, many men left to work abroad as builders, and from about 1815 until 1914 poor families sent their children each summer to work on farms in Swabia.

The Arlberg railway and its tunnel, built from 1880 and opened in 1884, brought the first tourists. The Arlberg Ski Club was founded at St. Christoph in 1901, and in 1907 Hannes Schneider arrived as a ski instructor; his Arlberg technique transformed modern skiing, and in 1922 he founded the St. Anton ski school. With Rudolf Gomperz, who ran the tourist office from 1926, he made the village a leading resort, and the first Arlberg-Kandahar race was held here in 1928. The municipality took the name St. Anton am Arlberg in 1927.

The Nazi years brought arrests and antisemitic signs at the village edge; Gomperz was deported and murdered, and Schneider was persecuted until he was brought to the United States in 1939. After 1947 tourism grew fast, the road tunnel opened in 1978, and the village hosted the 2001 Alpine World Ski Championships, for which the railway was moved to the village's southern edge. The village was quarantined in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a mudflow buried part of its centre in 2024.

St. Anton thinks of itself as a cradle of alpine skiing. Hannes Schneider's teaching method, the ski school he founded and the instructors who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s carried the Arlberg's way of skiing around the world, and Arnold Fanck's films of the 1920s and 1930s, among them The White Ecstasy of 1931 with Leni Riefenstahl and Schneider himself, made the village's slopes famous. Later films such as Downhill Racer and Chalet Girl were shot here too. The ski and local history museum in the Trier villa keeps that story.

The resort's other reputation is for après-ski. Bars on the slopes just above the village and along the Dorfstraße fill from late afternoon, and with more than half the visitors coming from outside the German-speaking world, the language at the bar is often English.

Beneath that, the village keeps the habits of a Catholic Tyrolean community. The parish churches of St. Anton and St. Jakob are its old centres — St. Anton's consecrated in 1698 and given a modern interior by Clemens Holzmeister in 1932, St. Jakob's a closed baroque ensemble with a valuable pulpit. St. Anton's cemetery, below the village, is a listed monument.

The municipality had about 2,300 residents at the start of 2026, about 1,650 of them in St. Anton itself and the rest in St. Jakob. Its area of about 166 square kilometres is larger than Liechtenstein. Tourism dominates an almost single-track economy: around 10,000 guest beds bring about a million overnight stays each winter, and the craftsmen, shops and services that remain largely depend on the ski trade. The Arlberger Bergbahnen, the largest lift company in the Ski Arlberg pass network, runs 31 cable cars and lifts.

Life follows the seasons. In winter the village is crowded and loud, the days built around the lifts and the evenings around the bars. Summer, once quieter, has grown again since the 1990s with mountain biking and walking on about 96 km of marked trails, and an outdoor pool and wellness centre opened in 2002.

Natural hazards are part of local life. Avalanche barriers built after the deadly Wolfsgrube avalanche of 1988 were only completed in 2014, the 2005 floods destroyed the main road, and the 2024 mudflow buried streets and cars around the station and the Rendl lift, cutting road links from Vorarlberg for a week.

St. Anton eats the food of Tyrol, which leans on milk, cheese, flour and bacon. Tiroler Gröstl — boiled potatoes, onion and leftover beef or pork fried in a pan, often served with a fried egg — and Speckknödel, dumplings with pieces of bacon, are staples of Tyrolean cooking. Käsespätzle, soft egg noodles layered with grated cheese and fried onions, is eaten on both sides of the Arlberg, and Tyrolean speck, a juniper-flavoured ham that is salt-cured and smoked, is sliced on boards with bread.

Kaiserschmarrn, a lightly sweetened shredded pancake named after Emperor Franz Joseph, is one of Austria's best-known dishes. On the mountain, huts and mountain restaurants are spread across the ski area, and some of them also open for summer walkers. Schlutzkrapfen, half-moon pasta filled with potato, meat or spinach and curd, come from the same old Tyrolean kitchen.

Evenings centre on the Dorfstraße, where restaurants, pubs and late bars share the pedestrian street. Beer is the usual drink, and a fruit schnapps sometimes closes a meal.