The Obereggen Ski Area is 40

The Summer of 1970: Eleven audacious young men found the Obereggen Ski Lift Company. In their free time, they go from door to door, raising the necessary funds to establish Obereggen as a new ski area. They promise that the new ski area will help create jobs and help to attract visitors to this natural paradise at the foot of the majestic Latemar (which has since been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO). The young men meet with lots of approval, but also with pessimism: How could Obereggen, of all places – an obscure mountain village with just a 20-bed inn and only a single connecting road – become a ski resort area?

40 Years Later: That dream has now become a reality: The Latemar Ski Center, with 48 kilometers of slopes, 18 modern ski lifts, numerous ski lodges, and lots and lots of sunshine, is now celebrating its 40^th anniversary. And all around, an outstanding tourist community listed among the "Pearls of the Alps" has developed. The project launched by those eleven ski pioneers has become a ski resort area which testers have repeatedly acclaimed as having among the best-groomed slopes worldwide (!) – and what more-auspicious an award could a ski area wish for? And the fact that the most-prestigious European championship races of the world are held here every year at the start of the season is likewise telling – and every year with a star-studded line-up that you'll be hard pressed to find at any other European championship race: During the last two races, no one less than the Olympic Slalom gold-medallist Giuliano Razzoli and the Slalom World Cup winner Reinfried Herbst were victorious.

In the 40 years since its founding, Obereggen has consistently displayed the spirit of innovation – from the first connection to the Pampeago Ski Area in the mid-1970s, the noteworthy test of snow cannons at the dawn of the use of snow machines in the early 1980s, all the way up to the establishment of the new Maierl Slope only a few years ago.