Silvretta Region of Ischgl, Kappl, Galtur and See

A snowHead

Silvretta Region, in the order of entering the valley, has 4 resorts of See, Kappl, Ischgl and Galtur. The amount of piste lengths in each resorts are 33, 40, 235 and 40km respectively. Ischgl is the major resort. Apart from its size Ischgl is also linked to Swiss Samnaun and so it is one of the few resorts one can ski to another country just to have lunch there and return back on the same day. This valley starts at Landeck. Ischgl is only 28 miles from St Anton of Arlberg if you want to know where it is.

We did a 5-day trip at the end of Jan 2008 to Silvretta Region with own car. The wife and I stayed in Valzur, about 5km from Ischgl, and got the accommodation down to 25 Euro per head B&B. The total cost for the en-suite room icluding tax was 52.5 Euro per night for both of us. That is about 1/2 of what has been reported in this thread in feb 2007. The difference was we had a car and managed to stay a few kilometers from the resort to avoid the premium price. The pension we stayed wasn't busy as we were the only guest there!

The huge parking areas in the gondola stations In Ischgl are all free except the underground section. Free parking appears to be the norm in Austrian resorts unless one wants to park right in the middle of a town centre. As with all the major resorts we have visited a major business of the Austrian resorts appears to come the day trippers.

Ischgl appears to be an up market resort dominated by mainly 4 and 5 star hotels. The restaurants, the facilities and the skiing infrastructure are all first class. One gets this feeling from how the food is prepared, presented and the variety provided at the mountain top restaurants. The shops in the small village are full of trendy goods and there are plenty good restaurants to choose from. Even the car parks are regularly attended to remove the snow blanket to facilitate the parking by the visitors. While skiing I was impressed by a convoy of 10 snow bashing machines grooming a blue slope in a staggered formation as a convoy. This was in the mid day and the grooming was just to improve the heavily traffic section.

Skiing in Silvretta Region during our stay was nearly perfect. Almost every house in Valzur has 0.5m of snow on the roof. The snow clearing intensity seemed to be twice as frequent as many French resorts. The Silvretta Valley is steep, narrow and sparsely populated. Thus it is pretty cold to start with. The Silvretta 4 resorts rise in level from 1000m to 1500m and snow did appear to last longer. Ischgl is actually 2 valleys behind the main valley run and so it is a skiing paradise in a mountain range of its own.

Just three runs from Ischgl and one can be in Switzerland. That seemed to be magic to me. Ischgl was the busiest but the number of skiers there was not enough to spoil the piste. Queues were nearly non-existent. The bottlenecks are the bottom lift stations but the efficiency was second to none.

We also tried the remaining areas of Galtur which was equally stunning for being at the end of the valley with a frozen reservoir next to one of the chairlifts. We skied Kappl while it was snowing heavily and so did not explore it much. The See area was well catered for the beginners and early intermediates and had nice and long red slopes to ski from the highest point to the bottom of the valley. The facilities of the small Silvretta resorts are excellent and appeared to be well maintained and managed better than many of the small French and Italian resorts we have seen. It would appear to us that many of the small resorts are catered for beginners and early intermediates, judging from the ratio of small children to adult skiers.

My current impression of Ischgl is that it is better if not as good as Lech, the upmarket resort of Arlberg.

While in Silvretta we drove a 38 miles journey to ski Serfaus/Liss/Ladis. That is a stunning resort, with 185km piste and 53 lifts. The piste map of Serfaus/Liss/Ladis states that it is “home of family holiday” and its infrastructure certainly lives up to the standard. It is a wide area as well as Ladis, Fiss, Serfaus and Masnerkopf each occupies a valley of its own.

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Silvretta Region of Ischgl, Kappl, Galtur and See

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