Grossglockner Grossglockner & High Tauern Travel Guide: Best Hotels, Restaurants & Experiences

Austria's highest peak rises 3,798 meters above the Hohe Tauern National Park, where the Pasterze glacier still creeps down the mountain's eastern flank. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road — 48 kilometers of hairpin turns built in the 1930s — delivers visitors to the Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe viewpoint, though the serious dining happens in the valley towns below. Heiligenblut clusters around its fifteenth-century Gothic church, while Kals am Grossglockner serves as the preferred base for mountaineers tackling the Stüdlgrat ridge.

The culinary scene draws from Carinthian and East Tyrolean traditions: Kasnudeln (cheese-filled pasta), Schlipfkrapfen, and game from the surrounding forests. Summer brings hikers to the 150-kilometer Glockner Trail; winter transforms the landscape into backcountry skiing terrain far removed from the manicured pistes of the Arlberg. Hotel kitchens source from local dairy farms, and the region's mountain huts serve substantial alpine fare to climbers returning from the Erzherzog-Johann-Hütte, Europe's highest staffed refuge.