Portillo

Portillo occupies a high, narrow basin in the heart of the Andean cordillera, its principal hotel perched at 2,880 metres above sea level where the air grows thin and the light sharpens. Thirty-five groomed pistes fan out from an upper station at 3,310 metres down to a base at 2,548 metres, yielding a vertical descent of 762 metres. Fourteen lifts—including the original twin single-chair lines—serve slopes flanked by serrated ridges and glacial cirques. The resort lies some 61 kilometres northeast of the town of Los Andes and about 160 kilometres from Chile’s capital by road, yet its isolation feels profound, as though the valley itself were lifted from another world.

From its earliest stirrings in the late nineteenth century, the site now known as Portillo bore witness to restless enterprise. In 1887, English engineers carving the Trans-Andean Railway first lodged at the shores of Laguna del Inca, lacing snow-packed slopes with improvised skis to relieve monotony. Two decades later, in 1909, members of the German Excursion Club based in Valparaíso began seasonal pilgrimages that formalized skiing as a pastime in Chile. The inauguration of the railway tunnel in 1910 accelerated such visits, the same trains ferrying early enthusiasts between Caracoles and Juncal like rudimentary ski-lifts.

By the 1930s, proposals for an organised ski area took shape on paper. Construction stalled through a failed hotel venture in the early 1940s but resumed under governmental auspices by 1942. Seven years later, a modest 125-room alpine inn opened its doors alongside two single-chair lifts and a drag-t-bar. Management fell initially to the Chilean Army Mountain School, whose lack of hospitality experience prompted a shift to private hands in 1960. On 15 June 1961, American entrepreneur Henry Purcell formally unveiled the newly christened complex. He and his family—today proprietors of a chain of Chilean lodgings—entrusted the resort’s fledgling ski school to Austria’s Olympic gold medallist Othmar Schneider, establishing a standard of technique that would endure.

The valley proved capricious. In mid-1965, a series of avalanches on the western slopes shattered several lifts, and even more destructive winds—storm-force gusts estimated at over 200 km/h—levelling tournament infrastructure in the weeks before the Alpine World Ski Championships. Yet reconstruction pressed onward, and on a clear morning in August 1966 the world’s ski community gathered beneath those same peaks. It was on Portillo’s steep, iced pitches that Jean-Claude Killy first announced himself, capturing gold in both the downhill and the combined. To date, Portillo remains the sole Southern Hemisphere host of a world ski championship.

Beyond competition, Portillo has drawn national teams from Austria, Italy, the United States, Germany and others during the northern summer—an inversion of hemispherical seasons that transforms these slopes into a window on winter for athletes worldwide. In 1987, on the specially constructed Kilómetro Lanzado track, German racer Michael Prufer shattered speed records by exceeding 217.68 km/h. Such feats retain Portillo’s reputation as a proving ground for speed and precision.

Rising above the resort is Ojos de Agua at 4,222 metres, its flanks mirrored by the loftier summits of Los Tres Hermanos (4,751 metres) and La Paraya (4,831 metres). To the east, across the valley and the international frontier at Paso Los Libertadores, looms Aconcagua—at 6,961 metres the loftiest peak outside Asia, its snowfields visible on clear days from Portillo’s terraces. The confluence of such peaks frames each run with austere grandeur.

Since opening in 1949, Portillo’s slopes and guesthouse have welcomed over three million visitors, an unassuming figure that belies the resort’s outsized influence on South American winter tourism. Ownership remains under the Purcell family, whose Tierra Hotels portfolio extends from Atacama’s desert lodges to this high-mountain enclave. The ski season generally spans from mid-June until early October, when corridors of snowfall permit uninterrupted gliding under crystalline skies.

To arrive at Portillo is to step into a place less concerned with spectacle than with the sheer, unforgiving clarity of high-altitude snow. Its yellow-and-white hotel stands alone against the serrated backdrop, not as an ornament but as the final refuge before the ascent. Beneath the rattle of chairlifts and the thrum of wind, each traveller finds a tether to the valley’s early pioneers—from English surveyors to German clubs—whose simple pleasure in sliding down slopes endures in every carved turn.