More than a mile up in Europe’s winter playground, the sprawling ski arena of the Silvretta range in the Austrian Alps is criss-crossed by 42 cable cars and ski lifts disgorging up to 20 000 skiers a day on to the 130 miles of perfect pistes.
Planted among the peaks are cafes and restaurants, shops and bars, cash dispensers and open-air concert venues. Alanis Morissette will be yodelling in the snow here next month. Sting, Tina Turner, and Elton John have drawn thousands more up the mountain in recent years.
This weekend the Silvretta is teeming with Easter holidaymakers relishing the snow and the sunshine against the spectacular Alpine setting.
At the foot of the slopes in the Austrian village of Ischgl, the 1 400 natives have never had it so good. This weekend marks the finale to another lucrative skiing season. Over a generation, winter sport has transformed what was a sleepy mountain village into a mass tourism magnet growing fat on some of the highest land and property prices in Austria.
Not content with the scale and success of the fourth biggest ski resort in the Austrian province of Tyrol, however, Andreas Steibl has his eyes set on the bigger and the better. ”You’ve got to bear in mind both the environmental and the economic factors,” said the pony-tailed manager of the Ischgl tourism association. ”But we’ve got to stay competitive. We’re getting more guests every year. We have to expand our skiing area.”
On the other side of the Silvretta ski slopes soars the Piz Val Gronda, a pristine and untamed peak dropping from 2 800 metres (9,186 feet) to the Swiss border, an Alpine wilderness broken only by a splendid old wooden refuge lodge that provides shelter for ramblers, scientists and alpinists.
Ischgl – its mayor, tourism association, cable car company, and leading hoteliers – are determined to develop the slopes of the Gronda, investing â,¬8m to obtain a further 45 miles of pistes. And there’s the rub. The project is drawing a swelling resistance movement, turning the Piz Val Gronda into an Alpine battlefield, a test case for the future of mass tourism in the Alps.
Powerful Alpine lobbies, environmentalists, and government circles in the provincial capital of Innsbruck, 90 minutes away, anxious to court the substantial green vote, are mobilising against what they term the greed of the developers and the never-ending ”spiral of growth” in winter tourism.
”The Alps are totally overdeveloped, the most exploited mountain range in the world,” said Michel Revaz of Cipra, the Liechtenstein-based International Commission for the Protection of the Alps. ”The brakes have to be applied. All the economic experts agree that the ceiling has been reached. Winter tourism can’t take any more growth.”
Governments and business leaders across the region increasingly agree. Swiss banks are now reluctant to lend on ski development projects. Building new ski resorts has been banned in Switzerland and Germany. In January the Tyrol government sitting in Innsbruck, the self-styled capital of the Alps, launched its most radical bid to call a halt to the relentless development. All projects on the quarter of Tyrol that is conservation territory were outlawed and the government issued a blanket ban on all new ski developments.
Ischgl is furious. ”It’s a very strict law,” said Mr Steibl. ”It’s difficult to be positive towards these curbs.”
Villages like Ischgl across Austria, Switzerland, France, and Italy depend entirely on winter tourism. In Tyrol the industry accounts for up to a quarter of the economy. But a majority of the population in the Alps inhabits towns and cities, not the ski resorts, and the urban crowds are increasingly fed up with the congestion, the sprawling resorts and the huge car parks, and are anxious about the environmental cost.
The conflict over the fate of the Piz Val Gronda is symptomatic of a bigger battle being waged across the Alps at the local level, among and between the seven Alpine countries – Austria, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia, and Liechtenstein – and at EU headquarters in Brussels. In the French Alpine region of Morzine, a string of municipalities has united to block a mega-ski project. Italian non-governmental organisations are campaigning for tighter curbs in the Dolomites. In Tyrol, two further disputes are raging over whether a couple of glaciers should be opened up to the ski pistes and the crowds.
Ten years ago this month, all the Alpine countries signed the Alpine convention, a binding international treaty regulating development across the region. Since then, the treaty has spawned a bureaucracy, but become bogged down in bickering. While Austria and Germany have ratified the treaty’s eight protocols, Italy, France and Switzerland have balked. While the politicians squabble, the developers push ahead with ever higher and ever bigger ski resorts.
The Alpine ski industry is trying to counter the threat of global warming by building ever higher in the peaks and on the glaciers in order to secure snow guarantees and extend the skiing season. It is also resorting increasingly to the use of snow cannons and artificial snow on the pistes, and to link up existing ski resorts through more chairlifts in order to create mega-skiing regions.
Global warming is the spectre stalking the industry. A study by Zurich university geographers forecast that within a generation up to 70% of the Swiss glaciers will have disappeared. The impact will be even more severe elsewhere where the Alps are not so high. ”Many mountain villages in central and eastern parts of Austria will lose their winter tourist industry because of climate change,” the geographers predicted. ”In Italy, half of the winter sport villages are below 1,300 metres. In future there will only be a few winters with snow in these resorts.” This gloomy prognosis means, according to industry analysts, that the future of skiing in the Alps will belong to relatively few but huge and high resorts.
Ischgl is determined to be among the fittest in this survival contest. That explains its determination to develop the Piz Val Gronda, which will confer size and height, and offer potential to link up with other resorts.
Last year the mayors of Ischgl and a string of neighbouring villages demanded a green light for the new skiing project from the government in Innsbruck. The boss of the local cable car company which runs the resort threatened to turn skiers away from Ischgl if building permits were denied, a tactic denounced as blackmail by the opponents.
”No one believes a word they say. They will develop the Piz Val Gronda, then another slice of the Alps, then another,” said Fridolin Scholz, 72, a retired electrician who is heading the resistance campaign from his home outside Heidelberg in southern Germany.
The Austrian, Swiss and German Alpine federations, mustering well over a million members between them, are all fervently opposed to the project and lobbying the government in Innsbruck.
”It’s a political battle, a classic conflict of interests,” said Peter Hasslacher, mountain planning expert at the Austrian Alpine Federation in Innsbruck and an influential opponent of the project. ”If the Ischgl project is approved, all the other developers will say, why can’t we do the same. But if we succeed in stopping this, we can change the trend of development in the Alps. It will be a turning point.” – Guardian Unlimited Â