A high-resolution gridded dataset of daily mean temperature and precipitation series spanning the period 1980–2018 was built for Trentino-South Tyrol, a mountainous region in north-eastern Italy, starting from an archive of observation series from more than 200 meteorological stations and covering the regional domain and surrounding countries. The original station data underwent a processing chain including quality and consistency checks, homogeneity tests, with the homogenization of the most relevant breaks in the series, and a filling procedure of daily gaps aiming at maximizing the data availability. Using the processed database, an anomaly-based interpolation scheme was applied to project the daily station observations of mean temperature and precipitation onto a regular grid of 250 m × 250 m resolution. The accuracy of the resulting dataset was evaluated by leave-one-out station cross-validation. Averaged over all sites, interpolated daily temperature and precipitation show no bias, with a mean absolute error (MAE) of about 1.5 ∘C and 1.1 mm and a mean correlation of 0.97 and 0.91, respectively. The obtained daily fields were used to discuss the spatial representation of selected past events and the distribution of the main climatological features over the region, which shows the role of the mountainous terrain in defining the temperature and precipitation gradients. In addition, the suitability of the dataset to be combined with other high-resolution products was evaluated through a comparison of the gridded observations with snow-cover maps from remote sensing observations. The presented dataset provides an accurate insight into the spatio-temporal distribution of temperature and precipitation over the mountainous terrain of Trentino-South Tyrol and a valuable support for local and regional applications of climate variability and change. The dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.924502 (Crespi et al., 2020).