Liechtenstein is a stop on the road and a mountain above it

How the pass route made Liechtenstein a stopover

The valley that became Liechtenstein lay on the transit route to the passes of Graubünden, and the Historisches Lexikon des Fürstentums Liechtenstein lists who used it before anybody travelled for pleasure: merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and people on their way to the spas. Some inns along the road lived on that traffic from the late Middle Ages. The road itself needed protecting. The Lexikon dates the first serious efforts to hold the Rhine back from the imperial road, the Reichsstrasse, to the eleventh or twelfth century, because the river spread across a valley floor that stayed largely marsh and hard to cross into modern times.

Crossing the river was a matter of fords and ferries. At low water the Rhine could be waded at Triesen and at Trübbach until it was straightened, and the faster current that followed stopped new fords from forming. Ferries were the reliable way over. Bridges began replacing them in the late 1860s, and the last ferry in Liechtenstein stopped in 1918.

The railway arrived in 1872, on the line between Feldkirch in Austria and Buchs in Switzerland, and it cut across the north of the country. The Lexikon treats that connection as the start of tourism in the modern sense, because it made Liechtenstein reachable for German and Austrian holidaymakers. It also fixed the pattern that still holds: the main line of travel runs through the north and the lowland, and the places people came to stay were somewhere else, up the slope to the east.

Why guests leave Liechtenstein after so few nights

The Lexikon judges that tourism was never very important to the economy of Liechtenstein, and puts that down to limited scenic and cultural potential against neighbouring Graubünden, which became a tourist region on a different scale. Accommodation and food service generated 0.9% of Liechtenstein's value added in 2023, against 1.9% in Switzerland.

What the country did attract was people with a reason to be there briefly. After 1945 internationally active companies brought business travellers and their clients, and they and other short-stay visitors pulled the average stay down early: by the 1950s the average visitor stayed two nights. Since the 1940s the Lexikon also records a kind of visitor who grants Liechtenstein one or two hours. Vaduz lies close to the north to south motorway over the San Bernardino, and touring coaches and travellers on European circuits use it as a stop on the way. That day trade mostly benefits the jewellery and souvenir shops of Vaduz, where Eduard von Falz-Fein opened the first tourist shop in 1945.

The figures of the 2020s keep the same shape. The 116,759 arrivals and 222,266 overnight stays of 2023 cover hotels, holiday flats, youth hostels, dormitories and camping, and work out at just under two nights a guest. Britannica notes that most visitors come from the surrounding countries and centre their activities on Vaduz.

Liechtenstein Marketing reported in March 2025 that overnight stays reached 228,579 in 2024, 2.8% more than in 2023, and that stays had lengthened slightly. The Lexikon's older ratio, written in 2011, is a useful check on the scale: since the 1950s Liechtenstein has received roughly twice as many guests a year as it has residents. The resident population stood at 41,237 at the end of 2025.

How spa houses opened the Liechtenstein mountains to visitors

Tourism began in the mountains, and for decades it happened only in summer. In 1875 a whey and fresh air cure house opened on the Alp Gaflei. A cure business is recorded on the Alp Sücka from the 1870s as well. More cure houses and summer resorts followed in the mountain area: Masescha in 1877, Samina in 1879, Malbun in 1908 and Silum in 1912. A panorama drawn in 1897 for the back of a Gaflei prospectus shows the cure house, enlarged between 1895 and 1898, above the Spoerry cotton mill in Vaduz, industry and tourism arriving in the same decades.

Walking made the mountains a destination in their own right. The Dreischwesternweg, a path with a stretch called the Fürstensteig, opened in 1898 and became an attraction. A Liechtenstein section of the German and Austrian Alpine Club was founded in 1909, and the first refuge hut, the Pfälzerhütte, followed in 1928. Another Alpine inn opened at Steg in 1925.

The trade was fragile. It collapsed during the First World War and recovered after the German and Austrian currencies were stabilised in 1923 and 1924. German guests were the majority at first; after the world economic crisis began in 1929 visitors from Switzerland became more important, and during the Second World War they made up more than half of all guests.

The Triesenberg slope had been lived on long before any of this. Britannica records that Walsers, descendants of settlers from the Swiss canton of Valais, arrived there at the end of the thirteenth century, and their dialect is still distinct. The Lexikon names Triesenberg as the commune that profited most from the mountain, walking and ski trade.

How Malbun's summer pasture became a ski resort

The shift to a year-round season was visible in the 1930s. Between 1934 and 1939 the Kurhaus Malbun put up skiers from Germany and Belgium. Access came in stages: a postbus service to Malbun began in 1932, a tunnel near Steg improved access to the mountain area in 1947, and the road into Malbun has been kept open all year since 1959.

The first ski lift was built at Steg in 1950, although Steg went on to develop mainly as a cross-country area. Malbun took the downhill trade. The small valley, traditionally lived in only in summer, gained five ski lifts, two chairlifts and nine hotels between 1962 and 1979, and the huts of its spring pastures became holiday houses. Several projects for mountain railways up from the Rhine valley failed between the 1930s and the 1970s.

The Lexikon's landscape entry sets the two sides of that valley head against each other. Gross- and Kleinsteg keep their two traditional rings of settlement, while the Malbun valley has been shaped since the 1960s by hotel buildings and ski lifts. Further down, the lower Samina valley holds a wilderness the Lexikon describes as barely touched by people for many decades. The Samina itself is a whitewater river about 10 kilometres long that rises at Triesenberg and flows into the Ill in Austria near Feldkirch.

The mountain hotels still carry a third of the summer trade. In the summer season of 2024, from May to October, Liechtenstein's hotels recorded 100,824 overnight stays, 1.3% more than in the summer of 2023. The Alpine hotels in Steg and Malbun accounted for 32,870 of them and the hotels in the Rhine valley for 67,954.

What the Rätikon offers walkers above the Rhine valley

The mountain side of Liechtenstein belongs to the Rätikon, a chain that runs from the Falknis, 2,562 metres, in the west to the Silvretta group in the east, with its main ridge forming the frontiers between Switzerland, Austria and Liechtenstein. The name is a mistake that stuck. The Roman geographer Pomponius Mela used the mountain name Retico around 40 to 50 CE, and in 1518 the St Gallen humanist Vadian applied it, wrongly, to this chain.

Two of its summits are Liechtenstein's own reference points. The Naafkopf, 2,570 metres, is the point where Liechtenstein, Graubünden and Vorarlberg meet, and the Grauspitz, 2,599 metres, is the country's highest ground. Wikipedia counts 32 mountains of at least 2,000 metres inside the principality, with the Falknishorn, 2,452 metres, at its southern tip. The rock is Malm and Cretaceous limestone resting on an undulating base of Prättigau flysch, and the dolomite walls on the south side of the chain are known as climbing ground. The first ascents in the Rätikon date from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

What a walker crosses on the way up is set out in the Lexikon's landscape entry. The Rhine-facing slope is warm and wooded; beyond the crest, the Kulm, the mountain area is alpine meadow, rock bands and snow, with summer pastures wherever grazing is possible above and below a tree line at 1,800 to 1,900 metres. Britannica describes much of the principality as lying above 1,800 metres, and the whole mountain area as drained by the Samina through three main valleys. The geography of that slope, and how the valley floor below it was won from the Rhine, is the subject of the geography article.

How visitors reach a country without an airport

There is no airport in Liechtenstein. The nearest large one is Zurich, about 130 kilometres away by road; St Gallen's small airport is about 50 kilometres away, and Friedrichshafen, across Lake Constance, about 85. A heliport at Balzers takes chartered helicopter flights.

The railway is the line of 1872, of which 9.5 kilometres lie inside the principality. Britannica describes it as part of the Paris to Vienna express route; Wikipedia adds that Railjet and EuroCity long-distance trains do not stop in Liechtenstein. The stations are Schaan-Vaduz, Forst Hilti and Nendeln, with Schaanwald closed since 2013, and they are served on working days by a regional train, the S2 of the Vorarlberg S-Bahn, run by Austrian Federal Railways between Feldkirch and Buchs. Plans to upgrade the line and run more trains were halted by a referendum in 2020.

Liechtenstein Bus is a subsidiary of the Swiss postbus system, run separately, and it connects with the Swiss rail network at Buchs and at Sargans. Holders of a Swiss Travel Pass who live outside Switzerland and Liechtenstein ride those buses free.

The border with Switzerland is open. The customs treaty with Switzerland, signed on 29 March 1923 and in force since 1 January 1924, took Liechtenstein into the Swiss customs area, and there has been no customs border between the two since. Swiss border and customs officers secure the frontier with Austria instead; Wikipedia gives 21 Swiss and 20 Austrian border guards on that border as of 2011. Liechtenstein entered the Schengen Area on 19 December 2011.

Most practical details follow Switzerland. The currency has been the Swiss franc since 1921, sockets take the Europlug and the Swiss SN 441011 plug at 230 volts, traffic drives on the right, cars carry the code FL and the telephone code is +423. Clocks keep Central European Time and change on the same Sundays as in Switzerland and Austria, so a walk from one country into another needs no change to a watch.

Where Liechtenstein's hotel guests come from

Swiss guests accounted for 46.1% of overnight stays in 2024 and German guests for 21.7%, according to Liechtenstein Marketing's report of March 2025. Travellers from the United States and from the Benelux countries came next, at 4% each. The Swiss figure is the one that moved. Nights spent by Swiss guests rose from 46,717 in 2019 to 92,590 in 2024, and the agency attributes the rise to Swiss travellers who discovered their neighbour when the pandemic closed other destinations and then kept coming back, helped by marketing aimed at the Swiss market.

Hotel rooms have filled as well. Net room occupancy averaged 53.3% in 2024, against 43.7% in 2019. The same report mentions a new hotel opened in Eschen, in the Unterland.

The organisations doing the selling have a long record of their own, and for much of it Liechtenstein was sold alongside its neighbours. From 1900 to 1921 an association for tourism in Vorarlberg and Liechtenstein published a joint brochure, Sommer-Stationen in Vorarlberg & Liechtenstein. Local tourist associations formed from 1929 and joined in a national federation in 1935, the year Erwin Hinderer wrote the first official guidebook to the principality. A law of 1944 introduced a tourism levy and created a national tourism commission, which gained an office in 1952 and a central tourist agency in 1972. Liechtenstein joined the regional tourist association of north-eastern Switzerland in 1952 and the Swiss national tourist office in 1964. Since 2000 promotion has been the job of a public body, Liechtenstein Tourismus, and the 2025 report was issued by Liechtenstein Marketing.

When weather and holidays shape a visit to Liechtenstein

The climate is milder than the altitude suggests, and Britannica puts that down to the foehn, the warm southerly wind. Wikipedia adds that the foehn lengthens the growing season in spring and autumn and brings temperatures around 15 °C even in winter. Britannica gives annual precipitation of about 900 to 1,200 millimetres depending on the place, and as much as 1,900 millimetres in parts of the mountains. Winter temperatures rarely fall below −15 °C, and the average daily maximum in summer runs from about 20 to 28 °C.

The Office of Statistics counts the summer season from May to October, and in 2024 the valley hotels carried about two thirds of its nights and the Alpine hotels of Steg and Malbun the remaining third.

Public holidays follow the Catholic year. The labour law lists 13, and all but Labour Day on 1 May are church feasts; the National Day has fallen on the Assumption, 15 August, since 1940. Banks and the national administration also close on a handful of days outside the law, Shrove Tuesday among them, which is the last day of the Fasnacht season described in the culture article. The full list, with the dates for each year, is on the holidays page.