Estaciones de esquí en Germany

German skiing is concentrated in Bavaria along the Austrian border, with a smaller scene in the Black Forest and the Sauerland serving the north. Areas are compact, generally under 60 km of piste, and built around day trips and weekends from Munich, Stuttgart and Frankfurt rather than week long stays. Garmisch Partenkirchen is the flagship, with the Zugspitze glacier at 2,720 m providing Germany's highest and most reliable terrain and the Classic area on the Kandahar slopes providing its most serious.

Elsewhere in the Bavarian Alps, Oberstdorf, Berchtesgaden and the Allgäu resorts offer pleasant tree lined skiing at modest altitude, with snowmaking doing much of the work in a warm winter. The Feldberg in the Black Forest and Winterberg in the Sauerland are low and small but serve enormous populations, and their lifts run floodlit into the evening through the week.

Germany's real strength in winter is the breadth of the non alpine offer. Cross country skiing has a huge following, with the Allgäu, the Black Forest and the Bavarian Forest maintaining extensive prepared trails, and Oberstdorf and Ruhpolding are world centres for nordic competition and biathlon. Tobogganing runs are everywhere, often long descents from a mountain inn. Add thermal spas at Bad Reichenhall and Bad Tölz, ice skating, and the winter walking network, and a Bavarian ski break works even for a group where not everyone skis.

Bavarian mountain food is the familiar and unapologetic version of Alpine cooking. Schweinshaxe, roast pork knuckle with crackling, Schweinsbraten with a dark beer gravy and a bread dumpling, and Weisswurst with sweet mustard and a pretzel before noon are the fixtures. Kaiserschmarren and Apfelstrudel appear on hut menus exactly as they do across the Austrian border, and Germknödel, a steamed yeast dumpling filled with plum jam and drowned in vanilla sauce and poppy seeds, is the classic mid afternoon collapse.

Lighter options exist and are worth knowing about: Obatzda, a spiced soft cheese spread eaten with pretzels and radishes, Leberkäse in a bread roll from a bakery counter, and Käsespätzle where you would order Kasspatzln in the Tirol. In the Black Forest, the smoked ham and the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte are genuinely local rather than tourist inventions.

Beer is the national contribution and the mountain huts pour it properly, usually a Helles or a Weissbier from a Bavarian brewery, with the alcohol free Weissbier as the standard drink for skiers who still have an afternoon to ski. Glühwein and Feuerzangenbowle, mulled wine with a rum soaked sugar loaf set alight over it, run through the Christmas markets and into the ski season. Après ski in Garmisch and the Allgäu is cheerful, beer led and generally finishes earlier than in the Tirol.

Garmisch Partenkirchen hosted the 1936 Winter Olympics, the Games at which alpine skiing appeared as an Olympic discipline for the first time, with a combined event for men and women. The town was created for those Games by merging the two separate villages of Garmisch and Partenkirchen. The ski stadium and jump remain in use, and the Vierschanzentournee, the Four Hills ski jumping tournament, still stages its New Year competition there in front of a large crowd.

The Kandahar downhill at Garmisch is one of the more technical courses on the World Cup circuit, with the Freier Fall start ramp among the steepest on the calendar. Oberstdorf, at the other end of Bavaria, is a nordic capital, hosting the opening event of the Four Hills tournament and the Nordic World Ski Championships several times, most recently in 2021.

German alpine club culture predates the resorts. The Deutscher Alpenverein, founded in 1869, built and still maintains a network of mountain huts across the Bavarian Alps and in the Austrian Tirol, and its early members did much of the exploratory work in these ranges. Ludwig II's castles, Neuschwanstein and Linderhof, sit within reach of the Allgäu resorts and are a reliable bad weather day for a group.