Boutique Hotels in Tyrol

In Tyrol the first question is always which valley. The Inn runs east-west through the state's floor; Innsbruck sits halfway along it, where the side valleys begin to branch south. The Ötztal, the Stubaital, the Wipptal, the Zillertal, the Paznaun, the Kaisergebirge — each with its own dialect, its own ski culture, its own architecture, and patterns of farming that have not homogenised across short distances. "Tyrolean" is less a uniform identity than a federation of valley identities, and any Tyrolean hotel proposition depends on which valley its driveway leaves.

What unifies the valleys is a regional identity defended fiercely since Andreas Hofer's 1809 resistance to Napoleonic rule. The fierceness survives in the dialect and in the panelled-stube architecture of nearly every farmhouse-turned-hotel in the state. The loss of South Tyrol to Italy at the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain is still legible in the cuisine and in the order Tyroleans use to describe themselves: first Tyrolean, then Austrian.