Alpbach
"I kept checking whether I'd accidentally walked onto a film set. I had not."
The road up to Alpbach leaves the Alpbachtal floor and climbs through forest in a series of switchbacks that seem designed to delay the reveal. Then the trees thin and the village appears on its south-facing shelf above the valley — the dark wood chalets with their red geranium flower boxes, the white church with its bulbous tower, the green alps rising in every direction behind the rooftops — and you stop the car because there is no alternative. Every year Austria holds a competition for its most beautiful village. Alpbach has won so many times it stopped being interesting as a competition and became simply a description. This is what a Tyrolean mountain village looks like when it has been inhabited with care for five centuries and nobody burned it down or modernized it too aggressively. It is not a reconstruction or a theme park. It is the place itself.
The Alpbacher Stil — the architectural style that governs virtually every building in the village — involves specific proportions of dark larch wood, specific roof pitches, specific window arrangements, specific flower box placement. It is not strictly enforced so much as deeply maintained by a community that understands what it has. The chalets sit close together on the hillside, connected by paths of tamped earth or old stone, and in June when the flower boxes are at their most riotous — geraniums in six shades of red and pink, trailing nasturtiums, fuchsia — the cumulative effect is almost hallucinatory. I walked through the village on a June afternoon and genuinely could not work out what to do with my eyes.
The European Forum Alpbach has been held here since 1945, bringing together politicians, economists, scientists, and thinkers for a summer conference that takes the village temporarily hostage every August. The incongruity is magnificent: international policy discussions in a room where the windows look out on cowbells and meadow flowers, Nobel laureates eating Tyrolean cheese in a village hall. The forum leaves the village quietly proud and visibly unchanged. I arrived the week after it ended and the only trace was a stack of conference brochures in the hotel lobby that someone hadn’t gotten around to discarding.
The hiking above the village is the other argument for going. The Reitherkogel at 2,374 meters provides views south over the central Tyrolean Alps and north into the lower Inn valley that justify the two-hour climb from the village. I went up on a late August morning when the high meadows were in the last stages of summer bloom — the small alpine flowers, pale yellow and white, that appear only at altitude and only briefly — and came down by a different route through the Schatzbergalm, where a dairy hut was selling milk directly from the tank, still warm, in a ceramic cup.
The village Gasthaus in the center serves Tyrolean food that has been cooked this way for so long that innovation would feel impolite. I ate Gröstl — the Tyrolean hash of potatoes, leftover roast meat, onions, fried in lard until crusty — for breakfast one morning, with a fried egg on top and a glass of cold buttermilk on the side. It is the kind of breakfast that makes you understand entire alpine civilizations. The buttermilk was slightly sour and very cold and tasted like the meadow the cow had come from, which is a reasonable description of all good dairy in Tyrol.
When to go: June for the flowers at their peak. Late July and August for hiking with reliable weather, though the Forum Alpbach period in August brings temporary congestion. September is quieter and the surrounding alps begin their color change — worth it if you’ve already done the June flowers.