I arrived in Kitzbühel in mid-July, which is to say after the ski season and before the hiking crowds had entirely committed, and the town caught me off-guard. I had expected a resort: the branded ski jackets, the hotel lobbies with a competitive relationship to the concept of luxury, the kind of alpine place that has traded its soul for a Michelin star and a celebrity client list. What I found instead was a working medieval town that happened to also be one of the most famous ski resorts on earth, the two realities coexisting with a composure I found remarkable. The pastel facades on Vorderstadt — rose and ochre and sage — belong to buildings that have been here since the fifteenth century. The cobblestones are genuinely cobblestones, worn smooth by six hundred years of boots.
Kitzbühel was a silver and copper mining town before it was anything else, and the old town’s layout reflects this — compact, defensive, prosperous, built around the business of extracting and trading wealth. The town grew rich and then stayed rich, which is why the houses look the way they do. Walking through Hinterstadt in the morning before the café terraces filled was to understand something about the relationship between old money and good architecture: both tend to avoid ostentation and invest in quality instead.
The Hahnenkamm race — held each January, the most dangerous downhill in the World Cup circuit — casts a long shadow over the town in every season. In summer you can walk the Streif course itself, a thing I did on a Tuesday morning with a trail map and an increasingly clear sense of what those racers are dealing with. The Steilhang section drops at a gradient of 85 percent. Standing at the top and looking down at where the course bends left and accelerates into the Hausbergkante, I felt something that I think was vicarious fear, which is different from regular fear but not as different as you might hope. The course is maintained and marked in summer, and walking it from top to bottom takes about an hour and leaves you with a permanently revised opinion of the athletes who do it at 140 kilometers per hour in January fog.
The Kitzbüheler Horn rises directly above the town on the east side, counterpoint to the Hahnenkamm’s western dominance. I hiked from the town centre to the summit cross at 1,996 meters — a climb of nearly 1,400 meters — on a hot August morning when the path through the lower forest was entirely cool and smelled of pine resin and damp earth. Above the tree line the meadows were in flower and the views south opened up over the Kitzbüheler Alps in a way that made the effort feel like a fair exchange. I ate a Leberkäsesemmel from a paper bag at the summit and looked at absolutely everything for twenty minutes.
In the evening, Kitzbühel navigates its two identities with reasonable grace. The wine bars near the Lebenberg serve serious Austrian Riesling. The traditional Gasthäuser keep their Knödel and Tafelspitz on the menu without apology. The luxury hotel terraces do what luxury hotel terraces do. The locals, from what I could tell, go to the traditional Gasthäuser, which is always the correct signal to follow. I ate Tafelspitz — the classic Viennese boiled beef, done properly here with its broth and its Apfelkren and its Schnittlauchsauce — at a table next to four Tyrolean men who were deep into their second bottles of Blaufränkisch and discussing something with great seriousness that I suspected was not the boiled beef.
When to go: July and August for hiking and the town in its summer mode — genuine and accessible. January for the Hahnenkamm race week, which transforms the place entirely. Avoid the February half-term holiday weeks if you want to see the old town rather than the ski-week crowd.