You don't see them, and when you do, they run away: the chamois. There are an estimated 63,000 of these four-legged climbers in the Tyrolean mountains. If they all jumped down into the Inn Valley, they could form a line of chamois stretching from Innsbruck to Kufstein.
For die-hard Tyroleans, this is bitter news: the oldest mountain pasture in the country is managed from Italy. The Jagdhausalm is located in East Tyrol's Defereggen Valley, just before the national border. Grazing has been practised there since 1212. However, a few South Tyrolean families have held the right to do so for centuries.
Even before the invention of social media, people were cruel. Princess Margarete of Tyrol lived from 1318 to 1369 - and is said to have been so ugly that she is still known today as "Margarete Maultasch". It is no longer quite clear why; it is probably just slander, spread by envious men.
The bed linen is piling up in Tyrolean hotels and holiday flats. According to official statistics, the tourism industry provides 356,000 beds in winter - and therefore at least 356,000 pillows. There are probably many more, as the bed linen has to be washed from time to time. In any case, enough for what is theoretically the biggest pillow fight of all time: Just under half of the 776,000 Tyroleans could take part.
The view from a mountain hut is often spectacular. However, the view comes at a price, in the truest sense of the word. Food, drinks, fuel, crockery, materials for repairs, everything has to be brought up from the valley. And not every hut is located directly next to a cable car or near a forest road. Hut owners therefore spend between 8,000 and 14,000 euros per season just on transporting materials. The most expensive option is the helicopter, which costs up to 50 euros per minute of flight and transports a good 700 kilos in one go.
The first holidaymakers to discover Tyrol in the 19th century didn't plunge down the slopes, but into so-called farmer's spas. Even back then, stress-ridden city dwellers saw splashing around in Swiss stone pine tubs as a cosy break from everyday life. And rightly so! Only the word wellness probably didn't exist yet.
When the fun is over for some, the work begins for others. Nobody knows this better than the snow groomer drivers. Especially when there is fresh snow, the snow groomers sometimes have to drive all night. On the Stubai Glacier, for example, they are on the road for an average of seven hours a day. Extrapolated to a winter half-year, that would mean around 1,260 hours of grooming - or 52 days non-stop.
The area around Hall is known as the "vegetable garden of Tyrol". A small tuber therefore plays a correspondingly large role there: the radish. In its honour, a special festival is held every year in Hall, which has even made it into the record books - with the longest radish bread in the world. It was 42 metres long and topped with 50 kilos of radishes, among other things.
Taking the underground to winter sports? In Serfaus, this is not only possible, but highly recommended. Instead of cars on the road, an aerial tramway runs through the tunnel. Serfaus is the place with the highest underground railway in the world. It can transport up to 3,000 people per hour - almost three times as many as the population of Serfaus.
Tyrolean cuisine energises you for the whole day. People used to be much more precise about this, as food historian Franz Maier-Bruck once discovered. According to this, 56 kilograms of lard, 28 kilograms of butter, 1,000 to 2,000 eggs, 60 kilograms of wheat semolina and a barrel of Traminer wine were provided for "a happy delivery" in Tux. Women who had recently given birth had to eat 24 times in 24 hours. The children were also given a porridge of one and a half litres of milk per meal. Bon appétit!
