Last Friday, the Mountaineering villages celebrated their 12th annual meeting in Berchtesgaden and at the same time that the first Alpine Conference had also taken place in Berchtesgaden exactly 30 years ago (9-11 October 1989). In this sense, the mayor of the nearby Mountaineering village and host Ramsau praised "the fantastic agreement for the protection and sustainable development of the Alpine region", the Alpine Convention, on which the philosophy of Mountaineering villages is directly based.
The mountaineering villages have a lot to be proud of: beautiful landscapes and nature, authentic culture and, above all, the strong will and willingness of people to keep their villages like this and develop them sustainably. Thus, they have become a success story of the implementation of the Alpine Convention and are correctly considered to be exemplary places for a functioning sustainable tourism. The fact that tourism in the Alps has to take sustainable pathways - ecologically, economically and socially - is a task which everyone has to carry out together: tourism sector, politics, residents and tourists. The Mountaineering villages are a great example of how this can work.
Secretary General of the Alpine Convention, Alenka Smerkolj, emphasized how special it is that the Alpine countries had this vision 30 years ago, acted on it and were able to bring it into the form of the legally binding treaty of the Alpine Convention: "I congratulate the Mountaineering villages on building on the vision of the Alpine Convention and for becoming more and more international. May many more years follow for the Mountaineering villages!".