Vorarlberg, Austria’s smallest federal state, is very different from the rest of the Alpine Republic. It’s on the Rhine, not the Danube, geographic names like Montafon (a valley in the south) and Piz Buin (highest peak at 3,312 meters) testify to its Romansh past, and the local dialects are close to Schwyzerdütsch but not Viennese.
After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Vorarlbergers even planned a change of flag: 81 percent voted in a referendum in 1919 for a union with Switzerland, but they declined with thanks – they didn’t want to upset the comfort zone of the Confederation with even more Catholic and German-speaking citizens. Today, the people of Vorarlberg are proud of their “Ländle”, which, thanks to its strong export industry, is one of the highest-income and most innovative regions in Europe.
Source: Infographic WORLD
The architecture is unique in the Alps: Many new buildings are characterized by clear lines, glass and local wood, but quote the traditional construction method and thus create a unique combination of modernity and tradition. Tourism plays a major role in the rural parts of the country, especially in the Bregenzerwald and in the Montafon.
Anyone who is surprised that there is an Ernest Hemingway monument in the main town of the valley, in Schruns: The later Nobel Prize winner was enthusiastic about the village, spent two winters here in the 1920s, indulged his passions (skiing, gambling, mining) and wrote his novel “Fiesta”, with which he achieved his breakthrough as a writer.
Nice waiting
Normally nobody wants to wait long for the bus. It’s different in Krumbach. The village in the Bregenzerwald had seven bus stops designed by architects from seven countries – each one an eye-catcher! Architecture enthusiasts, who would never have thought of visiting Krumbach without the campaign, now come by bus, get off, walk from station to station and, quite incidentally, boost local tourism.
One of the most photographed stops is the “Forest” made of steel rods by the Japanese Sou Fujimoto with a spiral staircase and a lookout. With his scaffolding, he deliberately did not want to create a protective space, but rather leave room for nature and enable visitors to engage in dialogue with it. However, we recommend an umbrella for dialogues in bad weather.
This ladder to heaven is a bus stop
Source: Albrecht Imanuel Schnabel
water features
They have been around since 1946 and have long been a world-class attraction: the Bregenz Festival, which are visited by hundreds of thousands of music lovers in the summer. A spectacular open-air opera is staged every year on the world’s largest floating stage, directly above Lake Constance. The stage design is huge and is always designed opulently.
In 2021, the Verdi opera “Rigoletto” was staged with a gigantic clown’s head, and this year “Madame Butterfly” by Giacomo Puccini is on the program. The festival’s “house orchestra” is also world-class: the Wiener Symphoniker have been there from the start.
The Bregenz Festival impresses with its opulent scenery
Source: ©anja koehler | otherart.de
Cheese sky
From Bachensteiner to Räßkäse (spicy, made from hay milk) to Sura Kees, a sour milk cheese from the Montafon: With more than 40 varieties from around 180 mountain and valley dairies, Vorarlberg is Austria’s cheese heaven. Around two thirds of the 183,000 tons of milk annually (from a good 25,000 dairy cows) are processed into first-class cheese – tasteless rubber cheese does not exist here.
The largest mountain cheese cellar in Europe was opened in the Bregenzerwald in 2003, in which up to 32,600 cheeses, all made from raw milk from the alp, mature. The Käsekeller is one of 180 stations on the Bregenzerwald Cheese Route, where gourmets can get to know and taste the cheese culture on farms, in farm shops, inns, village and alpine dairies. Of course, this also includes the many local specialties such as cheese flatbread from the oven, handmade cheese dumplings or polmanudla, which are dumplings from Sura Kees.
Cheese plays an important role in Vorarlberg
What: Johannes Fink
The cable car multi
The family company Doppelmayr, founded in 1892, has built 15,300 cable cars and ski lifts to date. This makes Vorarlberg world market leaders.
Their gondolas and cable cars not only open up the peaks and ski areas all over the Alps, they are also on the move in 96 countries, for example in Vietnam (with the largest cable car cabin in the world for 230 people), in Bolivia (where the world’s largest urban cable car network at 30 kilometers connecting major cities of La Paz and El Alto) or in Whistler, Canada (where some glass-bottomed gondolas give you goosebumps).
Winter sports enthusiasts are particularly grateful for one innovation: in 2004, Doppelmayr invented the world’s first seat heater for chairlifts – which of course was first used in Vorarlberg and made skiers’ bottoms happy in Lech and Schröcken.
It goes without saying that these gondolas come from Doppelmayr. The Vorarlberg company is the world market leader
Quelle: picture alliance / Newscom
The quote
“Gadalada Laella”
Vorarlberg dialect word composed of Annual (master bedroom), Lada (shutter) and Lella (Open holder) – the parent’s bedroom window shutter open holder is a device common in the Alps to fasten a window shutter. In western Austria, people speak Alemannic dialects, which are similar to Swabian and Schwyzerdütsch and are difficult for Standard German to understand, sometimes not at all.
Or would you have known that owner gate, melt and Cap Stubborn, girl and kiss mean? If, on the other hand, a Vorarlberger kisses demands, he doesn’t want to be fined, but would like a pillow. It can be nice gloomy – Pardon: dizzy – become.
Bizarre, record-breaking, typical: You can find more parts of our regional geography series here.
This article was first published in March 2022.