The FIS Ski Museum Damüls is a compact yet fascinating heritage and ski museum tucked inside a former parsonage in the heart of Damüls, Vorarlberg. It's the perfect stop for anyone curious how a few wooden planks from Scandinavia grew into the alpine skiing culture we know today.
The historic parsonage building itself, dating back to 1608/1609 and reshaped by a renovation in 1882 and a further restoration in 2017, is worth a look on its own — a two-storey, shingle-clad timber structure standing on a gentle slope just below the parish church of St. Nicholas. Inside, the permanent exhibition unfolds in three chapters: the origins of skiing in Scandinavia and Vorarlberg's own ski pioneers, the craft of ski production, and the region's long racing tradition together with its successful athletes. Most of the exhibits were collected by Christian Lingenhöle, a former sports shop owner who made Damüls his home, and they offer a genuinely personal window into local ski history. The museum also traces 700 years of village history, since Damüls was one of the first Walser settlements in Vorarlberg.
How to get thereA nice detail: the last parish priest to live here was Reinhold Simma, a well-known local figure who later became the subject of one of the museum's special exhibitions.