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The history of tourism in the Alps starts early: the Val Senales Valley has been a destination for hikers and skiers since the 1920s – they came to appreciate the beauty of South Tyrol in winter. At the beginning of the 1960s, a group of young businessmen founded a company with the goal of developing a ski area. Between 1956 and 1970 the first ski lifts were constructed.
With the guidance of the Val Senales local businessman Leo Gurschler, the cable car company Funivie Ghiacciai Val Senales SpA was founded in 1972. After years of challenging and extensive construction in the Grawand area, partially by Leo Gurschler himself, the Val Senales Glacier Cable Car celebrated its grand opening on July 12, 1975. Its construction opened the way for the ski area at the Hochjochferner Glacier. Let’s look at how that went down:
Surveying work on the Grawand conducted by Leo Gurschler and his technicians, engineer Hubert Zuegg and Dr. engineer Dietmar Pohl.
Leo Gurschler’s adventurous bulldozer ride up to the Grawand (3212 m above sea level).
In the spring of 1973, construction of the material cable car to the Grawand began under the guidance of Leo Gurschler; initially, work focused on the mountain station. In 1974, the construction of the middle support as well as the valley and mountain stations followed.
The construction of ski lifts on the glacier went ahead. In January of 1974, the organizationally complex and risky transport of the four carrying cables followed – a decisive milestone in this visionary project.
The grand opening of the Val Senales Glacier cable car was crowned by the maiden voyage of the cable car, which symbolically marked the beginning of a new era for tourism and winter sports in Val Senales.
The small town of Maso Corto/Kurzras at the foot of the glacier was once home to only a few farms. Under Leo Gurschler’s guidance, the town expanded and transformed into the present sports village. In the decades that followed, new lifts, slopes and mountain huts, as well as a hydro-electric power plant were added. To remember the pioneering work of the young farmer and businessman Leo Gurschler, in September 2007 a memorial was erected in his honour in the town of Maso Corto.
In 2014 the South Tyrolean company Athesia and the Innsbruck entrepreneur family Schröcksnadel took over the majority of shares in Schnalstaler Gletscherbahnen AG. In autumn of 2018, the Schröcksnadel family sold their shares to Athesia, which has held the sole majority of the shares since then.
The ‘old’ cable car ‘Maso Corto - Grawand’ (B42p), built in 1975, was 48 years old and had already been overhauled twice, the first time in 1995 and the second time in 2015. Renovation and modernisation work on the glacier cable car, including the mountain and valley stations, began on the 17th of April 2023.
The new glacier cable car opened on schedule at Christmas 2023.
