One Week in Vorarlberg, Austria: A 7-Day Itinerary

Seven days in Vorarlberg cover six regions, five hotels and roughly 45 km (28 mi) of walking: the Lünersee in the Brandnertal, the Gauertaler AlpkulTour in the Montafon, a chocolate outlet and a monastery in the Alpenregion Bludenz, gypsum holes and herb picking in Lech, moorland and architecture in the Bregenzerwald, and two days in the Kleinwalsertal. Vorarlberg is the smallest province of Austria and the most varied per kilometre, which is why a week here works as a road trip rather than a base-and-day-trip holiday.

You need a car. The valleys run parallel and mostly do not connect to each other except back down at the Rhine, so the drive between two regions that look adjacent on a map can take an hour and a half.

Day 1: Hiking around the Lünersee

The Lünersee loop is a 6.1 km (3.8 mi) circuit of a mountain lake at 1,970 m (6,463 ft), and it is the right way to start a walking week because it is nearly flat. The Lünersee sits on the border between the Brandnertal and the Montafon, under the Rätikon range, and was a natural lake until a hydroelectric dam deepened it by 72 m (236 ft) in 1958.

Apart from that dam and the cable car station, nothing here is built. People come to climb, to walk the loop, and occasionally to fish.

Tips for hiking the Lünersee loop trail

Start on the left when facing the lake, which is the opposite of what I did. The loop can be walked in either direction from the cable car station, and going left gets the steep section out of the way while you are fresh and leaves the flat stretch for the walk back, when you may be watching the clock.

Going right, as I did, gives you the flattest and easiest part first. The path stays level until the back of the lake, where it starts to roll, and the last quarter is the only part that could be called tricky: still wide and well surfaced, but steep in one place. It is also the highest point of the trail, so it has the views.

With children or wheels, start right and consider turning back before the final climb. Pushing a buggy or a wheelchair up there is hard work. If you want to attempt it, bring the kind of light buggy that folds flat so you can carry it over the last stretch.

The official estimate is 1.5 to 2 hours for someone of normal fitness without long stops. I did it in about 1 hour 20 minutes, taking plenty of photos but walking fast, because I had arrived in the afternoon and had under two hours before the last descent. With hindsight I had more time than I thought.

Practical information for the Lünersee

Getting to the Lünerseebahn

The Lünerseebahn cable car is the only way up, and you reach its valley station by car or on bus line 81 from Brand. Buses are infrequent and the timetable shifts with the season, so check before you rely on one.

Driving, the last section is a narrow mountain road. It is easy enough to drive, but you may have to find a passing place for oncoming traffic. There is a large car park at the station.

Sturdy trainers were enough for me on this trail. Bring sunglasses and sunscreen, because there is no shade anywhere on the loop.

Taking the Lünerseebahn

The Lünerseebahn runs daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. between 23 May and 26 October 2026. Ascents leave every 15 minutes from 8 a.m., with the last one at 4.55 p.m., and descents every 15 minutes from 8.10 a.m., with the last at 5 p.m. There is no longer a lunch break in the timetable, and the interval is 15 minutes rather than the half-hour older guides describe.

Tickets. An adult return costs €26 ($30, £23), or €24.70 ($29, £21) for seniors and €15.60 ($18, £14) for children. A single ride up or down is €16.80 ($20, £15) for adults, €16 ($19, £14) for seniors and €10.10 ($12, £9) for children. The Montafon-Brandnertal Card covers the ride.

Note how far that has moved: the return was €12.20 when this itinerary was first walked, so budget from the current figure rather than an old one.

Food and drinks on the loop

The Douglasshütte sits beside the cable car station and is the reliable stop. The Lünerseealpe on the far side sells local products but was shut when I passed and publishes no dependable hours, so carry a snack if you are on a tight turnaround.

Where to stay in Brand

Hotel Sarotla is a four-star hotel beside the golf course in Brand, and it is a 10-minute drive from the Lünerseebahn. Hotel Sarotla gave me a good dinner and a full breakfast buffet, and every room has a balcony, a television and a modern bathroom.

Bathrobes are provided, which you need for the spa: a Finnish sauna, a steam bath, an infrared cabin, a solarium and a hot tub, with a relaxation room looking out at the mountains. Massages are bookable. Rates for Hotel Sarotla are on Booking.com.

Day 2: Hiking the Gauertaler AlpkulTour in Montafon

The Gauertaler AlpkulTour is a 12.8 km (8 mi) loop through the Montafon region past 13 installations by the local artist Roland Haas. The Gauertaler AlpkulTour climbs 332 m (1,089 ft) and descends 1,232 m (4,042 ft), and the official time is 4 hours 40 minutes without a lunch stop.

Each station asks you to look at the landscape differently and explains something about alpine pastoral life. If you read German, the QR codes beside them carry more.

My experience hiking the AlpkulTour

I started at 9.45 a.m. and was back at the car by 2 p.m., so allow 4 to 5 hours including a short lunch. The trail is graded medium and I found it very manageable, and I am not an experienced hiker. The grading comes from a few steep sections and from the long descent if you take the red route back to the car park.

The signage is the one genuine difficulty. The trail is well marked, but not marked as the AlpkulTour, which confused me at the start. Carry the route map from the Gauertaler AlpkulTour page and navigate by place names instead.

Good hiking boots matter here, less for the gradient than for the surface: mud when it is wet, and loose gravel on the stretch past the Lindauer Hütte.

The installations are worth seeing and they are not why you come. The landscape is. I set off in fog, with haze drifting across the slopes above and below me, and walked into a herd of horses grazing beside the path. As the sky cleared the cowbells started to sound cheerful rather than eerie, and I was quietly impressed at walking among animals that large. A few months later I was walking not between them but with them, at the Almabtrieb.

You will meet cows and possibly horses on this walk. They are used to hikers and will ignore you if you ignore them.

Where to eat on the route. Alpe Latschätz, the fifth station, is a hut producing the regional Sura Kees cheese, which you can buy and eat there at outdoor tables. The Lindauer Hütte further on is a full mountain inn with a restaurant and a large terrace serving Austrian dishes, snacks and drinks; I had a salad and a coffee. The red route back passes two more huts, and there are restaurants at the cable car stations.

Practical information for the AlpkulTour

Getting there

Drive to the Latschau cable car station at Latschaustrasse 62, 6774 Tschagguns, and take the Golmerbahn up. Do not get off at the first stop as I did: you need to leave the cabin at Matschwitz and immediately board again for Grüneck, which is where the hike starts.

Getting onto the right path at the top is the only navigational moment that matters, because the arrows do not say AlpkulTour and the entrance gate shown on the plan is not visible from the station. Leave by the exit on the left, walk up to the signpost where the path forks, and take the left fork. After that it is straightforward.

The yellow route brings you back to the cable car one station lower at Matschwitz. The red route, which I took, walks down to the Latschau car park.

Parking is free and there are two car parks, a large one at the cable car station and a smaller one to its left reached by a different road. There was plenty of space when I arrived in the morning and almost none when I returned at 2 p.m., which is a good argument for an early start anyway.

Taking the Golmerbahn

The Golmerbahn runs in three sections, Vandans to Latschau, Latschau to Matschwitz and Matschwitz to Grüneck. The Golmerbahn operates daily from 8.30 a.m. to 5 p.m. between 23 May and 18 October 2026, with weekend-only service from 14 to 17 May.

Tickets. One section costs €14 ($16, £12) for an adult, used once. A day pass is €35.50 ($41, £31). There is also a Green Ticket at €42.50 ($49, £37) that includes public transport to and from the Golmerbahn within Vorarlberg on the day of purchase, which is worth the €7 difference if you are coming by bus or train. Discounts apply for seniors, children and groups.

These have roughly doubled since this itinerary was first walked, when a section was €9 and a day pass €18.

Where to stay near the AlpkulTour

Hotel Zimba is a family-run hotel in Schruns, under 15 minutes from the Latschau cable car station. Hotel Zimba is run by two generations of the same family, and it is a classic Montafon house with genuinely friendly staff.

After a day of walking there is a wellness area with a sauna, a solarium and an indoor pool, with bathrobes, slippers and towels provided. Rates for Hotel Zimba are on Booking.com.

Day 3: Chocolate, a monastery and a waterfall walk

Day 3 was meant to be a culinary hike in the Grosses Walsertal biosphere park and turned into a wet-weather day instead. Day 3 as it stands is the rainy-day version of this itinerary, and it is a good one: a chocolate outlet, a biosphere centre, a short waterfall walk and a monastery, all on the road towards Lech.

The Milka outlet in Bludenz

The Milka Lädele is the factory outlet of the Milka chocolate works in Bludenz, at Fohrenburgstraße 1, and entry is free. The Milka Lädele holds a one-room museum and a shop selling a far wider range of Milka bars, eggs and novelties than a supermarket carries.

Prices are ordinary rather than cheap. The draw is the selection, and the small exhibition you pass through before the shop, complete with the Milka cow.

Opening hours. Monday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 12 noon, Tuesday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. The shop closes over the Christmas and New Year period. Note the short Monday and Saturday: a lot of visitors arrive at 2 p.m. on a Saturday and find it shut.

There is a car park in front of the outlet with a coin-operated ticket machine, and the outlet faces Bludenz train station if you are on public transport. The town also holds a Milka festival at the beginning of July, which I missed by days.

Coffee and cake at the biosphärenpark.haus

The biosphärenpark.haus in Sonntag is the visitor centre for the Grosses Walsertal biosphere reserve, and it sits directly in front of the Seilbahn Sonntag. The biosphärenpark.haus has a café serving local foods, an exhibition about the reserve, and a small cheese dairy that is not always running.

The plan had been to take the cable car up for a two-hut hike and come back down for coffee and cake. The rain made it coffee and cake only. The exhibition is mostly in German, with enough visuals to follow.

Walking to Bad Rothenbrunnen

The walk to the Alpengasthof Bad Rothenbrunnen takes 15 minutes from the car park and follows a waterfall the whole way. The walk is well signposted and ends at a guesthouse in a genuinely picturesque spot where several trails converge, so you can also fold it into something longer.

Directions. Drive to Sonntag and turn right towards Buchboden. In the village, after Hotel Kreuz, turn right past Gasthof Jäger and follow the road. It will feel wrong. Keep going, along a small river and through woods, until the road ends at the car park. The address is Alpengasthof Bad Rothenbrunnen, 6731 Sonntag / Buchboden.

I was told the cake is very good. Having already had cake, I had soup, which was also good. This is a much gentler waterfall walk than the Krimml waterfalls I once hiked.

Visiting the Propstei St. Gerold

The Propstei St. Gerold is a working monastery at 850 m (2,789 ft) that doubles as the cultural centre of the Grosses Walsertal biosphere reserve. The Propstei still has a functioning church and now also hosts concerts, readings, seminars and retreats, and it has been renovated with real care.

The church, the Gnadenkapelle and the crypt are open at all times for anyone who wants to sit. The Geroldsstube, the Remise and the monastery shop are open daily from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. Guided tours of the complex run regularly and end with an aperitif in the wine cellar.

Walk the grounds while you are there. The Propstei keeps its own vegetable garden, a preserved room inside the main building shows how the monks lived, the small library is worth the detour, and the ground floor usually has an exhibition on. Parking is free and plentiful. The address is St. Gerold 29, St. Gerold.

Day 4: Gypsum holes and herb picking in Lech

Lech is known as an expensive ski resort and is a quiet walking destination in summer. Lech turns its White Ring ski circuit into the Green Ring for hikers, three days of trails covering a little over 24 km (14.9 mi), and it has the gypsum holes, which are in plain sight and almost impossible to notice unaided.

Hiking the gypsum holes

The gypsum holes date back 220 million years, to when the land that is now Oberlech lay far closer to the equator and was dotted with shallow lagoons. When those lagoons flooded and then evaporated in the heat, sulfates including gypsum were left behind. As the plate carrying them drifted north and collided with the European plate, the collision raised the Alps and lifted the old lagoon beds into the mountains, where the hollows are still slowly changing shape.

They are as green as everything around them, so at first you see nothing. Close up, the ground is sandier than it should be and so fertile that the flowers growing on it come up in unusually strong colours.

The walking is not hard. The path is mostly clear and there are ascents and descents, none of them punishing.

Book a guide even though you can walk the area alone, because the holes are the sort of feature that stays invisible until somebody points at it. Mine was Annalisa, who talked about the plants, the first settlements and the geology with a warmth that survived a grey, drizzling morning. To arrange a guided gypsum hole walk, email info@arlbergalpin.at and ask what is running during your stay.

Where to stop. We walked up towards the hut called Der Wolf, which is not a classic mountain hut at all. The timber exterior fits the hillside and the inside does not: modern, with the kind of music and winter season DJ sets you would not predict from the outside. The views from the terrace and the panoramic windows are the reason to go either way.

Picking herbs in Oberlech

Herb walks in Oberlech exist because the village’s kitchens built a reputation on what grows just outside their doors. Herb walks here are run by certified herb teachers and hiking guides through the Lech Zürs tourist office, and they are not the same thing as the private walk I was lucky enough to join.

Mine was with Thorsten Probost, who ran the kitchen at the Burg Vital Resort until 2019 and is no longer there, so this is an account of a walk rather than something you can book. He learned much of what he knows from Lady Lucian, who founded both the Burg Vital Resort and the Burg Hotel in Oberlech with her husband.

I am much more interested in eating than in cooking and I still came away amazed. That some herbs only give flavour if picked at the right point in the moon’s cycle. That the active ingredient in aspirin grows wild in the meadows above the village. He picked up one plant after another, naming what it treated and how to prepare it, like a walking encyclopedia.

I could not retain a tenth of it, and what stayed with me was a slightly uncomfortable thought: we walk through all of this seeing decorative flowers, when we are actually looking at something that would settle a headache or a cold. I would rather drink a herbal tea than take a pill when something feels off.

Booking a herb walk. Walks run weekly in summer and you must register in advance, by 4 p.m. on the day before at the latest. Call +43 5583 2161-0 or email adventure@lech-zuers.at for the current schedule, because the days and the season dates change from year to year.

The Lech Card. The card covers the herb walks and a long list of other guided activities, all the cable cars in Lech and Warth, the village bus, and entry to museums and attractions. Summer 2026 prices are €46 ($53, £40) for 1 to 2 days, €75 ($87, £65) for 3 to 4 days, €105 ($122, £91) for 5 to 7 days and €135 ($157, £117) for 8 to 14 days. Children under 14 go free and there is a discount for visitors over 70. These are roughly three times the 2017 prices, so ignore any older figure you find.

Where to stay in Lech

The Burg Hotel sits in Oberlech, the part of the village higher up the mountain, and it is family-run by the Lucian family. The Burg Hotel gave me a large room, a very good dinner and a breakfast buffet with pancakes in it.

There is a tennis court, a fitness centre, ski-to-door access in winter and an à la carte restaurant serving Austrian and international food. The spa runs to 1,200 m² with a sauna, steam bath, indoor pool and a sun terrace with loungers, and treatments cost extra. There is also a lounge, a games room and free bike hire. Rates for the Burg Hotel are on Booking.com.

Day 5: Nature and architecture in the Bregenzerwald

The Bregenzerwald is where Vorarlberg’s contemporary timber architecture is most concentrated, sitting in working farm villages rather than in a design quarter. The Bregenzerwald looks subtly unlike the rest of alpine Austria as soon as you drive into it, and Day 5 is built around three things that explain why: a moorland walk, seven bus shelters and a landslide.

Hiking the moorland of Krumbach

The Krumbach moor walk crosses 5.2 km (3.2 mi) of grass and forest with a guide who can tell you what everything growing in it is for. The Krumbach moors are the reason several local products exist at all, and we met our guide at 6 a.m., which sounds brutal and turns out to be the hour when the light is at its finest.

He explained how people used to cut the turf for fuel, and how a pond you can see now will be walkable wetland in a few years if the turf is left to take over. That is not what happened historically: much of Krumbach’s moorland was filled in to make gardens and usable land, until someone pointed out that the village was about to lose the landscape that made it itself, and what remained was protected.

Krumbach is now proud of the moors and sells them. You can book a guided moor walk, drink lemonade made with moor herbs, eat moor pig, and drink moor schnapps, and four official moor restaurants cook with plants from the moorland. One of them, the Gasthof Adler at Dorf 5 in Krumbach, gave us a very good breakfast afterwards.

Booking. Guided moor walks run on set dates through the summer and need to be arranged in advance. Call +43 5513 8157 for dates and the current charge, which was a nominal single-figure sum with under-14s free when I walked.

The BUS:STOP shelters in Krumbach

BUS:STOP Krumbach is seven bus shelters designed by architects from seven different countries in a village of about 1,000 people. BUS:STOP happened because Krumbach needed to replace its shelters anyway and one resident saw the replacement as a chance to show off the region’s building culture instead.

The village brought in Dietmar Steiner, then director of the Architekturzentrum in Vienna, who worked with the Vorarlberger Architektur Institut to pick seven international architects who were distinctive but not yet famous. All seven agreed. Their fee was a week’s holiday in the region.

The architects were not the only ones working for nothing. Each was paired with a local architect who supervised on site, craftspeople from across the region built the designs, and sponsors covered the materials. Residents, business owners and local associations then argued over the submitted designs at length, because the shelters had to suit local materials and techniques and also had to keep people dry and let them see the bus coming without stepping out into the rain.

Exactly one shelter fails that last test, the Japanese one, which represents a forest and offers no protection from wind or rain at all. The village liked the design enough to accept it anyway, and it was my favourite too.

Finding them. Three shelters stand on the L6, a road confusingly also called Krumbach, so search for “Gasthaus Kressbad” instead. Three more are on the road that begins as Unterkrumbach and becomes the Ladau and then the Zwing, two of them facing each other and the third a little further along. The seventh is on the 205. The simplest approach is to drive to the Gasthof Adler, which sits at the intersection of the three roads the shelters are on.

Hiking the Georunde Rindberg

The Georunde Rindberg is a 4.3 km (2.7 mi) circular walk with 13 stations across ground that slid down a mountain. The Georunde takes about 2.5 hours with 130 m (427 ft) of ascent and the same descent, and it exists because in 1999 the mountainside beneath Sibratsgfäll started to move and wrecked everything in its path, and the villagers decided to make something of the wreckage rather than tidy it away.

Older write-ups, this one included until now, describe the Georunde as a 2.1 km walk with 8 stations taking about an hour. The route has since been extended, so allow the full 2.5 hours.

Getting there and starting. Set a map to the Gasthaus Alpenrose, which is the last station on the route and has its own car park, with a smaller parking area shortly before it marked by a “Georunde Rindberg” sign. From either one, walk back about 100 m (328 ft) along the road. On your right is the first station, Felbers schiefes Haus, the crooked house of Felber, with an information panel and a track heading up into the mountains. That is the start.

You do not need heavy boots for this one. Sturdy trainers or walking sandals are enough.

Where to stay in the Bregenzerwald

The Krone in Hittisau is a family-run inn on the village square, a short drive from both Krumbach and the Georunde Rindberg. The Krone has been an inn for around 170 years and is housed in a traditional building with bright rooms, light wood, clean lines and a genuine quietness to them.

There is a small sauna, a fireplace lounge, a garden and a terrace looking over the village, and its restaurant gave me one of the better dinners of the week. Wi-fi is free, and there is ample parking behind the building and on the square in front of it. Rates for the Krone are on Booking.com.

Days 6 and 7: Kleinwalsertal

The Kleinwalsertal is an Austrian valley you can only drive into from Germany, which is why it feels separate from the rest of Vorarlberg. The Kleinwalsertal closed my road trip with a hike, a permaculture garden and a village called Baad where the road simply stops.

Hiking in Wildental

The Wildental loop starts on the road outside the Gästehaus Wildbach in Mittelberg and climbs steadily on tarmac past the Gasthof Alpenrose. The Wildental route follows the street called Höfle, and at the first proper junction you take the arrows right towards the Fluchtalpe, from where the road runs above the Wildenbach river, visible only in places.

A short way along there is an “energy place” where energy lines are supposed to converge. You cannot miss the sign on the right, which leads to an open circle behind the trees. The German instructions ask you to switch off your phone, stand on whichever spot draws you, and hold your palms towards the ground. I wanted to try it and lasted a few minutes. It was not the stillness that got me, because I have meditated before without much trouble. I simply got jittery, which I am fairly confident was the three coffees at breakfast rather than the energy lines.

Where I went wrong, so you do not. The Fluchtalpe is a hut serving Austrian food at the end of the Höfle road. The road bends left at the end, and with several people ahead of me doing exactly that, I followed them. What I should have done was go straight on, onto a small dirt path beside the river, reached through a gap in what is really just a rope marking where the cows stop. I never saw it.

Taking the path behind the Fluchtalpe instead gives you a steep, winding climb through trees, less hilly than stepped, as though someone had cut stairs into the mountainside. It is fine if you are reasonably fit and watch your footing. I decided a loop walked clockwise was still a loop and carried on.

Higher up I reached a junction signed for Germany one way and the Hinterwildenalpe the other, took the second, and climbed a narrow path to another hut. From there only one path appeared to lead on, so I took it. It narrowed as it went, mountainside on the left and a very steep drop on the right, and it ended at a piece of bare rock with climbing hooks in it and no trail over it. This was supposed to be a medium hike with no climbing. With my fear of heights well awake, I turned round.

Writing this up afterwards, I found on satellite images a second path leaving that hut and running parallel above the rock, obvious on screen and completely invisible to me on the day. A four-hour walk took me from 9.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. without a lunch stop.

I do not entirely regret it. The left side gave the better views of the waterfall, I got a serious workout, and I noticed that parts of the path that would have frightened me a few months earlier did not. A season of hiking in Austria had done something.

Wear proper hiking boots for this one. The first section is flat and easy and then the surface turns uneven. There are more tips on what to wear in Austria in summer in our separate guide.

Baad, the end of the world

Baad is where the roads in the Kleinwalsertal stop, which is why it is nicknamed the end of the world. Baad is reached by driving to its single car park at Baad 1, A-6993 Mittelberg, and beyond the village you continue on foot or by bike, with a trail starting at the car park itself.

I had been due on a seven-hour sunset hike that evening. After a five-hour day walk with no lunch, my legs had opinions, so I had a picnic there with Elmar from the Kleinwalsertal tourist board instead. Parking is charged by the day at a modest rate.

Andi’s permaculture garden

Andi’s garden sits on a strip of green along the Wildentalstrasse in Mittelberg, and it is designed to work rather than to look pretty. Andi built it as a permaculture garden, laid out to mirror how plants, herbs and vegetables actually interact in nature, and he lives off what it produces, with local restaurant kitchens buying the surplus because the quality is high.

I visited alongside a group of marketing students working on a bee-protection project, who wanted his advice on bee-friendly planting around the Kleinwalsertal. Listening to him run through the options was the second time that week, after the herb walk in Lech, that I was reminded how much is available to anyone willing to learn how it works.

Andi has also stepped steadily away from buying things, reusing what he can and trading for the rest, and what I liked was that he said all of this without once suggesting anyone else should live the same way. He just wanted to show that another way exists.

Visits run on a fixed weekly schedule during the summer months. Ask the Kleinwalsertal tourist office for the current day and time before you turn up, because the season dates move each year.

Where to stay in the Kleinwalsertal

The Gästehaus Wildbach is a small family-run guesthouse in Mittelberg-Höfle, where the Wildenbach runs down to the Breitach. The Gästehaus Wildbach put me in a room looking down the valley for two nights and serves a generous breakfast buffet with a view of the Walser mountains.

Every room has a balcony, satellite television and a kettle, wi-fi is free, and there is a garden with a playground. A fridge of cold drinks runs on trust, which tells you something about the place. There is a restaurant two minutes’ walk away, and the Wildental hike starts at the door. Rates for the Gästehaus Wildbach are on Booking.com.

To see what the weather is doing before you commit to a hike, the Kleinwalsertal webcams page carries a Mittelberg camera and more than 40 others.

How to travel to Vorarlberg

Fly to Zurich and hire a car, which is what I did, flying from Brussels and driving from Zurich Kloten. Vorarlberg has no airport of its own, and while the Rhine valley towns are on the rail network, the side valleys where all of this happens are not.

For the car, DiscoverCars compares prices and conditions across more than 900 rental companies. For the flight, Trip.com gives a clear overview of routes and which month is cheapest.

Travel insurance for Vorarlberg

Travel insurance is worth more on a week like this than on a city break, because six of the seven days involve mountains. It covers a cancelled trip, illness or injury abroad, and often broken or stolen electronics.

If you do not have cover yet, look at SafetyWing. You can sign up after you have already left, they were the first travel insurer to cover COVID, and when I had COVID they reimbursed my costs without an argument.

WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips

Five things are worth knowing before you drive this route, from what has changed since I walked it and what I got wrong on the ground.

1. Walk the Lünersee loop anticlockwise, starting on the left. I went right and had to hurry the steep final quarter to catch the last cable car. Going the other way puts the climb at the start and the flat stretch at the end, where the clock matters.
2. Get off the Golmerbahn at Matschwitz and get straight back on. The AlpkulTour starts at Grüneck, one station higher, and I lost time discovering that. At the top, leave by the left exit and take the left fork.
3. Do not arrive at the Milka Lädele on a Saturday afternoon. It opens 9 a.m. to 12 noon on Mondays and Saturdays, and only Tuesday to Friday does it stay open until 4.30 p.m.
4. Budget triple the old figures for Lech and the cable cars. The Lech Card now starts at €46 ($53, £40), the Lünerseebahn return is €26 ($30, £23) and a Golmerbahn day pass is €35.50 ($41, £31).
5. At the Fluchtalpe, go straight on, not left. The path you want is a dirt track beside the river through a gap in a rope fence, and the road bending left is a trap that cost me an hour and a half and an encounter with a rock face.

I explored Vorarlberg as a guest of Vorarlberg Tourismus. As always with a collaboration like this, I was free to write what I wanted.

About the author. This itinerary is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the first-hand notes in this post come from her week driving Vorarlberg, through the Brandnertal, the Montafon, the Grosses Walsertal, Lech, the Bregenzerwald and the Kleinwalsertal. The team covers Austria and Vorarlberg for independent travellers, including the hotels, cable cars and guided walks worth booking, and updates this page when prices, seasons and opening hours change.