In this study we describe the seismic analysis of precursory patterns of a rockfall in the “Rappenlochschlucht”, a gorge located in the Vorarlberg Alps, Austria. The rockfall with an estimated volume of 15 000m³ occurred on 10 May 2011 (10:48:43 UTC) and destroyed a massive bridge construction. Fortunately, the rockfall did not cause any casualties. A permanent seismic network consisting of three seismic small arrays was installed in July 2009 in 5 km distance to the gorge, at the Heumoes slope, in order to detect and locate slope-related fracture processes within a radius of a few hundred meters. By chance, the rockfall with an estimated equivalent local magnitude of ML,eq = 2.3 was recorded by the seismic network.We observed several smaller rockfall events up to three hours, and 12 fracture signals up to five hours prior to the rockfall. The smaller rockfalls and the fractures were both located in the vicinity of the source area where the main event emerged, applying absolute and relative localization methods.