Stuben am Arlberg Village
Stuben is a small, unspoilt village located near the centre of the Arlberg ski area, 10km west of St Anton am Arlberg and 5km from Zurs, offering good quality accommodation for up to 700 guests in mostly family-owned hotels, guest houses (B&Bs) and apartments.
Photo: Copyright © Stuben am Arlberg Tourismusbüro | Wilfried Graf
The history of Stuben can be traced back to 1218 when the first warming hut (Stube) was built as a refuge for travellers and merchants making the difficult journey over the Arlberg pass. Stuben’s first economic boom began with construction of the Arlberg rail tunnel c. 1850, when as many as 800 people lived in the village, but once the tunnel was finished most of them moved away, since which time Stuben am Arlberg has been home to around 100 permanent residents. Tourism has long since replaced the old forgotten trades, thanks especially to Hannes Schneider, Stuben’s most famous son.
Born in Stuben in 1890, Hannes Schneider was hugely influential as a ski teacher and pioneer of downhill skiing technique. He moved to St Anton in 1907 where he worked as a ski instructor for the Hotel Post, then Chairman of the Arlberg Ski Club (and arguably the world’s most famous skier) from 1929 until 1938. He fled Austria and the National Socialist Party in 1939 to live in North Conway, New Hampshire, USA, where he ran the ski school until he died in 1955 aged 65. The village has not changed much in the past hundred years or more and with no land available for further development it’s likely to stay unspoilt.
Around 75% of Stuben’s winter guests come from Germany with the remainder coming from Austria, Switzerland, Benelux, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom. Most are experienced skiers and boarders attracted to Stuben as a good value base from which to explore the Arlberg and because of the Albona’s off-piste terrain and superior snow record.
There’s little to do during the day besides skiing, boarding, eating and drinking, although you can go for a walk or try Nordic skiing on the cross country ski tracks which stretch all the way to Langen forest. Once a week, usually on a Tuesday night, the Stuben ski school organises floodlit tobogganing from Alpe Rauz down to Stuben. There are buses to Lech and Zurs where there are more facilities for activities like ice skating. Apart from ski rental and ski clothing shops, there are very few shops – just one general store for food and other basic provisions.
For a small village there are plenty of bars and restaurants, many attached to the hotels, and some have live music on one or two evenings in a week, but there are no night clubs, so if you want to dance until dawn you have to take a taxi to St Anton.
Because Stuben is so small, all the accommodation is within 5 to 10 minutes’ walk of the ski lift and piste.