Kitzbühel

Once a year, for one January weekend, Kitzbühel is the centre of the sporting world: the Hahnenkamm races send skiers down the Streif — the most feared descent in alpine racing, part free-fall, part legend — before a hundred thousand spectators and the assembled glamour of Europe. The town has been preparing for celebrity for seven centuries: founded as a copper- and silver-mining town under the Bavarian dukes and chartered in 1271, it grew prosperous enough to paint its gabled burgher houses in the festive colours that still line the traffic-free centre, medieval prosperity wearing Tyrolean dress.

Kitzbühel's image was fixed by one of its own: the painter Alfons Walde, whose oils of deep snow, sunlit farmhouses and dark-clad skiers between the wars created the very iconography of Alpine winter — the town's museum holds the definitive collection, and every ski poster since owes him a debt. Franz Reisch, the pioneer who first skied the Kitzbüheler Horn in 1893, made the town a cradle of the sport itself.

Between seasons the resort turns to tennis on clay, golf beneath the Wilder Kaiser's stone wall, and a social-cultural calendar of concerts and festivals in which the Hahnenkamm slopes serve as backdrop rather than protagonist. Chic, historic and unrepentantly alpine, Kitzbühel remains the mountain town other mountain towns study.