finding my inner Maria in the Austrian Alps

“Is this your first time in the Tyrol?” asks Jurgen, who has collected my partner and me at Munich airport and is driving us two hours south to a new luxury hotel in the Austrian Alps.

It is. Only in a way it isn’t. Ever since 1965, when I saw The Sound of Music as a six-year-old, I have thought of green pasture backed by snowy mountains as the pinnacle of natural beauty. And now, after six further decades in which I’ve watched the film dozens more times, I am finally visiting in person — spookily the same week a far-right party has emerged as the strongest in the Austrian elections.

But there will be no talk of fascism — or anything nasty — during my stay at Eriro. The point of this exclusive hotel, just opened and with only nine bedrooms, is not to dwell on politics or normal life at all but to get close and personal with nature. The hotel’s website shows a disembodied arm caressing a rock and a picture of a long-haired woman (who turns out to be one of the owners) walking barefoot round a lake. How ludicrous, I think, before reflecting that Fraulein Maria would surely have been up for some barefoot frolicking, and I should be too.

Looking out at the Ehrwalder Alm from a lounge at Eriro, which opened in August © Alex Moling

The view from one of the rooms © Alex Moling

Lucy Kellaway on her balcony

It is dark when we arrive at Ehrwalder Alm, so the only nature in evidence is inside the hotel — where it seems to be in plentiful supply. The walls and ceiling of our suite are made of rough wood from the forest and the walls covered in panels of local sheep’s wool. With my head on a pillow stuffed with alpine herbs I sleep soundly — to fling open the curtains in the morning and there it is, every bit as lovely as I knew it would be: green pasture, with the pointy silhouette of snowy mountains behind.

Every guest at the hotel gets a present of thick hand-knitted socks made from Tyrolean sheep and I put mine on to head out for breakfast — only to stub my toe falling over a large boulder that had been whimsically positioned outside the room.

Downstairs the dining room serves as a rustic viewing chamber for the panorama outside. It is ravishing in one direction, less so in another where the cable car arrives from Ehrwald, the village below, bringing hikers in summer, skiers in winter, to this beauty spot, 1,500 metres up in the shadow of the Zugspitze massif.

We sit on a carved banquette and watch as a feast is spread out on our table: two types of mountain cheese, homemade pâté, various sorts of ham, waffles, sourdough bread, eggs, homemade yoghurt and something dark brown in a dark brown bowl. The head chef, who is just 26 and has a big butterfly tattooed on his neck, explains that he only uses what is locally grown. So, instead of orange juice, there is a delicious sharp pink apple juice made from fruit that grows on the mountain. The dark brown stuff in the bowl is porridge stewed from the husks of wheat, with the whole grains toasted on top for a bit of crunch. Nothing is wasted, he assures us, even the yellowish salt served with the egg is partly made out of carrot peelings. Though I applaud this €1,500-a-night hotel for not putting carrot peel in the bin, I can’t help worrying about the fate of my uneaten waffles. This breakfast is among the best I’ve ever had, but in quantity it matches my weekly shop and, even though we had made serious inroads, there is plenty left uneaten.

Eriro sits on the flank of the Zugspitze massif, the border between Austria and Germany © Alex Moling

After breakfast I say I’d like a swim. Andrea, who runs the spa, takes us to a lake a short walk beyond a chairlift and some snow-making machines. The water is the colour of sea glass and reflects the mountains all around; it is just the right degree of cold on this October morning — a jolt to the system without being punitive.

Afterwards we go to a clearing in the forest and squat on a log while Andrea pours hot herb tea into rough pottery cups. We will do a meditation, she announces. This is something I generally try to avoid, but in these surroundings I find myself more or less surrendering to the moment. Indeed, I’m feeling so pliable that when we reach a shallow lake I remove my shoes and socks off my own bat and start to walk.

The great thing about being barefoot is you have to look where you’re treading — which means I notice tiny gentians in the grass and bend down to examine the radiant blue. The less good thing is that your feet quickly become cold, muddy and scratched by stones and prickly undergrowth. Reunited with my shoes, I reflect on what great and unsung things they are. Surely shoes should be up there with the wheel — and way ahead of the internet — as the greatest invention of all time.

Indeed the internet is something that Eriro considers its guests better off without. Henning, the charming hotel manager, has already showed himself to be the most obliging man on earth with all my requests of what I want to do. Hiking — yes! Wild swimming — yes! Yodelling — yes! It is only when I ask for the WiFi code that he goes evasive. This isn’t, he explains, what Eriro is for.

Looking over the Seebensee towards the Wetterspitzen, part of the Zugspitze massif © Ulrike Meutzner

Lucy Kellaway goes swimming in the Ehrwalder Almsee, a five-minute walk from the hotel . . . 

… and tries barefoot walking beside a lake

Without phones and with only each other for company we sit outside wrapped in wool blankets on a balcony. We gaze on the empty pasture which, a fortnight earlier, was home to 400 cows and sheep with their jangling bells, now retreated to the village for the winter. The day trippers who flocked to this place with their walking sticks in the summer have mostly gone too. In November the cable car will stop altogether, so until the ski season starts Eriro’s guests will have the mountains to themselves.

Presently we are brought lunch. There is no choice; had there been I would not have gone for dumplings, sauerkraut and mushrooms. How wrong I would have been. The orange mushrooms had been foraged that morning from the forest. The heavy dumplings feel sustaining, just what one needs for an afternoon in the mountains.

Only we don’t go into the mountains. I head to the spa where herbs are rubbed into my back and then lounge around in the sauna. This is amply equipped with more lumps of rock, as well as plunge pools and boiling hot chambers, all with the same exquisite views.

The Kneipp Path outside the hotel (a hydrotherapy treatment that involves walking along a pebble path under shallow water) © Alex Moling

Barefoot walking near to the hotel © Ulrike Meutzner

The hay-bale-lined ‘Hewi’ room, with a screen showing Alpine views and heated, vibrating leather loungers © Alex Moling

One chamber has no view at all. It is entirely lined with straw bales, with a screen at one end showing a video of the mountains. Facing it are two leather loungers heated by infrared lights and which vibrate to the stirring music played through headphones. The hotel is proud of this feature, but I’m baffled. When the real thing is just outside the window it’s not entirely clear why one would go to such trouble to recreate it in two dimensions, even with warm and wobbling chairs inside a haystack provided.

In the evening there is more local food — and local grog. I order a gin with a homemade Aperol-like liqueur made with gooseberries, which is so strong that the rest of the evening is a blur.

Afterwards there is nothing for it but to climb into the bath, slap bang in the middle of our suite and hewn from an enormous tree trunk. From this vantage point I count the gratuitous wood around me. The tap is hiding inside a branch. LED spotlights lurk in pieces of wood. The clothes hangers are made of branches — as is the rustic loo-roll holder.

The Zugspitze massif looms behind the hotel © Alex Moling

A bathtub hewn from a log in one of the bedrooms © Alex Moling

I had wondered where they got all this stuff, but the manager explained that Eriro has been rebuilt on the footprint of an earlier hotel by three local families, one of whom runs the timber merchant in the village — which makes me more inclined to forgive any excessive rusticness now I grasp the synergies involved.

Apart from the internet, the only other thing that the hotel frowns on is guests who stay fewer than three nights, on the grounds that it takes time to get the Eriro concept. This makes great business sense for them — but also suited me fine as I wasn’t paying, though even if I had been I probably wouldn’t have minded, as I was finding I liked the place more with every hour I spent there.

The next morning, any hangover was dispersed by an early dip in the lake followed by the hot plunge pool, leaving me re-born at breakfast and with an even keener interest in the brown porridge and pâté. We set out on a vigorous walk in the mountains with a guide who used to be a shepherd and showed us flowers and animal skeletons and even gave us a lesson in rock chemistry. By the afternoon we were happy to lie marooned on the day beds on our balcony doing nothing at all — save listen to the silence.

I have bad news for you, said Henning on our last night. The yodelling is off. Apparently, yodelling teachers are not very reliable — one had got the day wrong and the back-up had a family emergency.

Looking up to the Zugspitze massif from the hotel © Ulrike Meutzner

A salad of wildflowers and Alpine meadow herbs . . . © Alex Moling

 . . . and-foraged chanterelle mushrooms with elderflower broth © Alex Moling

Don’t worry, I said. I was in excellent spirits having eaten a flame-grilled fish from an alpine lake, a neck of goat that had been hanging in the basement for a bit and was now stewed in red wine, and a crème caramel flavoured with straw, which turns out to taste a bit like vanilla. I assured him we could happily hike up the mountain on our own.

So the final morning, after another memorable swim and another memorable breakfast, we started to climb up towards the Plattspitzen, whose rocky face is right in front of the hotel.

Alas, the cloud was low and thick and we could see nothing — except now and again a snow machine loomed into view. I tried to keep my spirits up with some DIY yodelling as we went — “High on a hill was a lonely goatherd/ Lay-ee, odle ay-ee, odle ay-hee-hoo!” — but it seemed the holiday was ending on a low.

After a long, unrewarding climb through the white fog, during which my partner decided he’d had enough, the clouds parted and I was above them, higher than the tree line with the snowy pinnacle of the Plattspitzen rising directly above my head and an emerald green pasture gleaming below. There was no one there to witness what happened next. In a surge of sheer joy, I flung my arms over my head, twirled around and bellowed: “the hills are alive, with the sound of music. . .”

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