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Linz / Stuttgart / Winterberg (dpa) - After the sometimes huge rush to Austria's ski areas, some regions are tightening the rules in the fight against the corona pandemic.
In Germany, authorities appealed to people to stop day trips in the snow and reminded them of closed ski lifts and restaurants.
There are school holidays nationwide, and employees have another long weekend ahead of them with New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.
After Christmas, the crowd in the middle of the corona lockdown in ski and local recreation areas had caused headshakes.
In Austria, the stricter security rules include a further limitation of parking spaces, more space to queue and more stewards, as the state of Upper Austria announced on Monday.
In the local ski areas Hinterstoder, Wurzeralm and Kasberg there was a big crowd on Sunday when the weather was nice.
Austria's Minister of Economic Affairs, Markus Achleitner, appealed to winter sports enthusiasts not to come to the ski areas until noon, because by then many guests would be on their way home from the morning.
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Many ski areas are open in Austria - but practically only for locals.
A ten-day quarantine obligation applies to travelers from abroad, including from Germany.
There was also a lot going on in Germany's mountains over the holidays.
In the Black Forest and the Swabian Alb, for example, day-trippers caused chaotic conditions on roads and parking lots in some places.
In addition, the police registered umpteen violations of regulations on minimum distances.
Nevertheless, Baden-Württemberg's state government is not planning to tighten the rules.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Health in Stuttgart said on Monday: "We appeal to people not to go on day trips and not to exhaust the existing rules."
This is mainly about tobogganing, walking and hiking, because ski lifts have been shut down because of the measures against the pandemic.
This was also pointed out by the tourism experts in the Sauerland, where the rush to Winterberg had led to chaos at the weekend.
Susanne Schulten from the Sauerland / Siegerland-Wittgenstein winter sports arena warned that the restaurants and toilets were not open either.
The city of Winterberg wrote on its website that tobogganing on the closed lifts is not allowed, "even if many people do."
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In Bavaria, too, there is great concern about crowds and chaos, for example in the Bavarian Forest National Park.
“The situation at the parking lots can only be described with the word catastrophic in many places,” said the deputy head of the park administration, Jörg Müller, on Monday.
Individual day trippers had walked "all over the central area" of the national park and thereby endangered animal species such as the capercaillie that were sensitive to disturbance.
At the turn of the year, the national park intends to use more rangers and point out the rules of conduct to visitors.
Elsewhere it was more relaxed: the parking spaces on the slopes in Garmisch-Partenkirchen were "definitely well attended," said a spokeswoman for the Bavarian Zugspitzbahn.
"But there were no traffic jams or parking chaos."
Other mountain railway operators, for example in the Allgäu, had completely blocked their parking spaces.
From the Hessian low mountain range, it was said that despite the rush of visitors over the Christmas holidays, everything remained within limits with regard to the corona restrictions.
On the Großer Feldberg in the Rhine-Main area, access roads to the summit were preventively blocked for individual traffic over the holidays.
The police also blocked large areas on Monday, said Deputy Mayor Hartmut Müller (CDU).
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 201228-99-833812 / 4