The upmarket Austrian ski resort where Dutch Prince Johan Friso was left brain-damaged by an avalanche will continue to market itself as an “off-piste Eldorado,” the region’s tourism chief said.

“You can’t make a whole mountain off limits ... We set great store by being an off-piste Eldorado,” Hermann Fercher, tourist board head in the westernmost Austrian state of Vorarlberg, told local radio last week.

He added that authorities “make a point of telling people to be well prepared (for avalanches), with beepers and airbags, so that they have everything in case something happens and in order to have the best chance of survival.”

On February 17, the 43-year-old prince was skiing off-piste in the Lech resort with a friend when the avalanche struck. At the time the avalanche alert level was at the second highest, posing a particular risk away from the prepared ski slopes.

The father-of-two, the second son of Queen Beatrix, might never regain consciousness after being starved of oxygen for 25 minutes under the snow, doctors in Innsbruck said last week.