Scene of the find

On 19 September 1991 Helmut and Erika Simon, two Germans who were on holiday, were hiking in the Similaun glacier area near the border between Italy and Austria at an altitude of 3210 m. They decided to take a shortcut and made a remarkable discovery: They saw a human corpse sticking out of the ice. Only its head and back were visible.

They assumed that it was an unlucky mountain climber who’d fallen. Worried, they raised the alarm at the Similaun mountain hut, and the following day the body was pulled out of the ice. Strange things were recovered with the body such as pieces of fur and leather, tufts of dried grass, and some birch bark. The full significance of these finds was only realized later. No one could know at the time that the find would become an archaeological sensation.

The name Ötzi, which a journalist gave the Iceman, comes from the name of the mountain range in which he was found: the Ötz Valley Alps.