Snowboarding in Europe

Skiing has its roots in Europe, so it’s no surprise that Europe has the oldest and best-developed ski industries. Biggest isn’t necessarily best of course but if you want to experience the world’s largest ski areas, head to the European Alps.

While the Alps are the star of the show, you find people skiing & snowboarding in Europe wherever there are mountains. You can ski in the Pyrenees (France/Spain/Andorra) and in Spain’s Sierra Nevada, in the Scottish Highlands, Scandinavia, Balkan countries like Bulgaria, and in the Carpathian Mountains which spread across several Central & Eastern European countries.

The Alps are home to massive ski areas with excellent terrain and usually good snow, with both purpose-built resorts and traditional Alpine towns in which to live or stay. The ski areas are well-developed and facilities are good; the downsides are that prices are fairly high (but still better value than North American resorts), and these ski areas are crowded – the locals all ski, and visitors pile in from the UK, from across Europe, and from further afield (you’ll hear many an Aussie accent). Lift lines can be very long and fresh dumps are quickly tracked out.

Andorra and Bulgaria are known for being more budget-friendly (but less impressive) alternatives to the Alps and are also very popular (and crowded) with ski-holidaying Brits, while most ski areas in Europe’s other mountain ranges tend to be more modest and cater more to the local populations.

Where I’ve been snowboarding in Europe:

1. Pas de la Casa / Grandvalira (Andorra)

2. Mayrhofen (Austria)

3. Innsbruck (Austria)

4. Bansko (Bulgaria)

5. Les Portes du Soleil (France/Switzerland)

6. Cairngorm Mountain (Scotland)

Pas de la Casa (Andorra)

Pas de la Casa is part of the large Grandvalira ski area which covers a significant percentage of the entire surface area of Andorra, known as a good place for beginners and intermediates while also being a more budget-friendly option than the beasts over in the Alps

Official website

Piste map

As well as Pas de la Casa, you can stay in the quieter Soldeu/El Tarter in the next valley and have access to the same ski area. These days Grandvalira also has a few terrain parks and a half pipe, and several ‘freeride zones’ i.e. in-bounds off-piste ungroomed areas which you are permitted to ride.

Pas de la Casa is rated as a good place to learn as the terrain isn’t too difficult and the ski school has a good reputation – it was the first place I went riding, and we probably should’ve taken lessons!

But we didn’t bother and just went for it by ourselves. Come the end of the week, a couple of us had started doing red runs without mishap, though there was probably a certain amount of luck in that (and red runs in Andorra are easier than red runs in the Alps). Our first attempt at a red had come at the urging of a couple of Scottish lads we’d been drinking with in the hotel bar the night before; “C’mon, ye can do it!” they told us, before realising that we actually could not do it at all and then spending a good 45 minutes shepherding us down a fairly short run. Good riders are not necessarily good teachers!

And another tip for beginners – which I’m sure most people really don’t need to hear – is don’t try snowboarding for the first time while you are drunk! After arriving in Pas we’d spent the first evening boozing on the dirt-cheap alcohol in the town’s bars, and decided it was time to have a cheeky little crack at snowboarding on the lower slopes… we hiked a short way up, but then struggled to even clip in to our bindings, never mind stand up (we were using the hotel’s rental boards). My mate got so frustrated that he gave his board a kick, telling it to “just fuck off”… and fuck off it most certainly did, at great speed down the mountain to the bottom of the slope where it shot out under the fence and flew across the road below, never to be seen by any of us again. Of course this could have had serious consequences had someone happened to be standing there and not seen it coming, but thankfully no-one was there and no-one was hurt. The same cannot be said for my friend’s wallet, which soon felt the pain of replacing a rental board he never even used! I guess the board was spirited away by a passer-by, perhaps just as an opportunistic theft but also perhaps to teach a lesson to the drunk idiots on the slope… lesson learned… don’t drink and ride, kids.

The hotel was cheap, the food was cheap, the snow gear was (relatively) cheap, and the booze was so cheap that we were giggling in the supermarket when we realised what we were about to buy; bottles of 70% absinthe (a drink which was still unavailable in the UK at that time) were just a couple of pounds, a fact which led to one particularly messy evening when our resident snowboard-kicker passed out in a pile of frozen dog excrement… furthermore, the travel companies which offer cheap ski trips to Andorra have taken the allure of cheap liquor to Brits abroad into consideration, and arrange Club Med-style pub crawls in which the punters are made to play stupid games and the reps end up stood on the bar pouring tequila straight into the crowd’s eagerly upturned mouths… suffice to say, early morning chairlifts were not a priority that week.

Pas de la Casa Summary

Not as cheap as it used to be, but still much cheaper than the Alps.

Not as good as the Alps, but still decent.

Access via Toulouse airport in France, involving a fairly lengthy bus transfer of around three hours (you can also take a bus from Spain but it’s further, so probably only useful if you’re already in Spain)

Useful Links for Riding at Grandvalira

Homepage and piste map

Snow Forecast for Pas de la Casa

Mayrhofen (Austria)

Located about a 1-hour drive from Innsbruck (or you can take the train, with a change at Jenbach), Mayrhofen sits picturesquely at the head of the Ziller valley, surrounded by mountains on three sides. The town hosts the annual Snowbombing music festival, and has a reputation for being the best party town in the Austrian Alps as well as having one of the better ski areas. You can buy a combined ticket (Zillertal Superskipass) for the whole Ziller Valley (covering four ski areas), or for each of the four areas separately.

(*this is the greatest vertical drop available for single runs, rather than overall. The highest and lowest points are located in different areas and not directly connected by skiable terrain)

Homepage and piste map

There’s no on-snow accommodation in Mayrhofen; you stay in town at altitude 630m, and ride one of the various gondolas up to the ski area in the surrounding mountains. The skiing in the immediate vicinity of Mayrhofen is divided between two mountains, Ahorn and Penken. The main gondola, the Penkenbahn, is one of the most impressive feats of ski lift engineering I’ve personally seen (up there with Whistler’s Peak2Peak), and definitely the most hair-raising; it climbs from 630m to 1,800m with only one support tower in the middle. This means that as you approach the middle tower and then the upper station, there’s a very long drop below – don’t look down if you don’t have a head for heights! To make it worse, the thing actually changes direction at the middle tower and the gondola pod swings out a bit as you go round the corner. Tends to induce a large volume of panicked screaming when the pod is downwards-bound and full to capacity, always made me chuckle! The lift was included in this amusing Whitelines article ‘The Five Scariest Lifts in the World‘, but it has since been upgraded (from the 2015/16 ski season) and is now faster (so less of a bottleneck – the old lift was as notorious for queues as it was for fear factor) and has much larger pods in place of the old standing-room-only boxes… I’m unsure whether that makes it any less scary, but at least you can now soil your ski pants in a little more comfort.

Anyway, once you’re safely up the Penkenbahn (hopefully..!) there’s a huge skiable area to explore which can keep you occupied for days. There are other gondolas coming up from different parts of the valley (all connected by shuttle bus), and also a gondola to the Ahorn ski area on the other side of town which isn’t physically connected to the Penken area, but covered on the same pass (Ahorn has the main nursery slopes, and also has a nice top-to-bottom run right down to the village which is popular with the local oldboys, who absolutely rip down it). Penken’s terrain park has a good reputation, and is certainly impressive; however, during my season in Mayrhofen it was lacking a beginner park with small features for learning on. There was a half pipe, a ‘big’ park with huge features, and a ‘small’ park which was actually intermediate and still too advanced for those of us on our first seasons – these days though, the park is divided into six different areas according to difficulty, with something for everyone.

There’s plenty of terrain and some good spots for getting fresh tracks after a big dump, though with it being such a busy resort the powder gets tracked out pretty quickly; definitely get up early if you want fresh tracks on a pow day.

The Hintertux glacier is a 30-minute bus ride from Mayrhofen, and with a top lift station at 3,250m it has good snow and remains open year-round. This gives you another large extra area to explore, though we never checked it out as it wasn’t included on our Mayrhofen passes and we were too broke to get a day-pass for it (if you get the Zillertal Superskipass, it includes Hintertux; otherwise, you can just buy a day pass)

I went to Mayrhofen with my housemate Alex after we finished uni, and it was by riding every day for a few months in Mayrhofen that I lost my beginner’s jitters and became a somewhat competent rider. Alex flew home, while I took the scenic route; I got an Interrail ticket and took the train from Innsbruck to Geneva (a stunning journey through the Austrian Tyrol, the entire micro-state of Liechtenstein, and the full length of Switzerland with great views of the Walensee, Obersee, and Zurichsee lakes) to go visit my brother, who was spending that season in the French resort of Morzine.

Mayrhofen Summary

One of the bigger and better resorts I’ve been to, Mayrhofen is especially good for beginners (good ski school) and intermediates (plenty of terrain to explore and improve on), and for advanced riders who love park (but perhaps less so for advanced freeriders looking for a variety of gnarly terrain). It’s also a nice little town with a lively apres-ski scene and an annual dance music festival.

Useful Links for Riding at Mayrhofen

Homepage and piste map

Snow Forecast for Mayrhofen

Innsbruck Ski Areas (Austria)

The best skiing near Innsbruck is in the Ziller valley, but the city has a number of local hills if you don’t have time to go all the way to Mayrhofen.

As mentioned above, I did a season in Austria with my university housemate – celebrating the end of education by heading off to the Austrian Alps that winter to be ski bums instead of getting real jobs and a start on the corporate ladder (as it turned out, he eventually spent many more years studying and now holds multiple degrees and a good real job, while I’m still a semi-ski bum with a semi-real job!)

Before trying our luck in Mayrhofen though, our first port of call was Innsbruck where the Austrian side of his family are from. We stayed with his grandmother who fed us up on delicious home-cooked Austrian food, and we spent our evenings playing chess and our days either snowboarding or looking for work around town. There are a number of ski areas in the immediate vicinity of Innsbruck, and we rode at three of them; Mieders, Patscherkofel (homepage), and Nordkette (homepage).

The first one we visited was Mieders, a very small family-oriented resort which was a nice enough day out but which I wouldn’t recommend to international travellers visiting Innsbruck and looking to ski. The city has better options.

Patscherkofel, to the south of the city, was used for the downhill skiing when Innsbruck hosted the Winter Olympics, and the Olympic run is the hill’s main draw. Patscherkofel is the best place in the immediate vicinity of Innsbruck for downhill skiing on groomed trails.

Nordkette on the other hand is smaller, but more attractive to snowboarders (and freestyle skiers) due to its terrain park and one very steep ungroomed run (the Haflekar) down from the top gondola station.

The Hungerburgbahn funicular train runs from the city centre to the Nordkette cable car station, making Nordkette the most convenient Innsbruck skiing option (the others are accessed by road). It also has some pretty awesome views.

The other main areas near Innsbruck (though we didn’t visit them) are Axamer Lizum, which also hosted some of the Olympic events and offers park & pipe, and the Stubai Glacier which is a bit further out on the border with Italy (a 30-minute bus ride away). Stubai is the biggest ski area you can hit for the day from Innsbruck without going all the way to Ziller.

Innsbruck Skiing Summary

The mountains around Innsbruck have a range of options, which taken together can keep you occupied for a good few days. In addition to the skiing around the city, Innsbruck has a lovely altstadt (old town) and is a nice place to check out in its own right. But really, if you’re in the area for snow, you want to be heading to Mayrhofen.

Useful Links for Riding in Innsbruck

Patscherkofel homepage and Nordkette homepage

Snow Forecast for Nordkette and Patscherkofel

Bansko (Bulgaria)

For a while now, Bulgaria has been touted as the ‘new Andorra’ of European skiing i.e. the destination of choice for budget-conscious European skiers. Bulgaria’s leading resorts are Bansko and Borovets, both to the south of the capital Sofia. A bunch of us went to check Bansko out and ended up having a cracking week both on and off the pistes, despite losing a couple of days’ riding when the lifts were completely closed due to severe winds on the mountain. In fact, we made good use of the downtime by renting cars and taking a couple of road trips – one to a spooky old church near the Greek border, and then the next day to neighbouring Macedonia.

Homepage and piste map

As for the skiing, it’s a very decent mountain with a top lift station at 2600m and a respectable 1600m of vert (although the longest ‘real’ run has a vert of around 1,000 – I say this because the run back down to the base from the top gondola station isn’t much of a run). The ancient Iron Curtain-era ski infrastructure has been replaced with a modern lift system, and they’re adding to this and opening up more and more terrain as the resort grows in popularity. For example, during one off-piste adventure we rode from the main ski area right down to the gondola base station, but rather than doing so via the ‘Bansko ski road’ (which gets pretty flat and may require some skating/tramping) we took a short ride & hike down a cat track near the top gondola station and passed through an abandoned ski area with ancient Cyrillic-only signs and maps, the disused chairlifts standing there like sentinels and the old pistes still just about rideable despite the new forest growth sprouting up through the snow. That abandoned ski area is abandoned no more, and with new lifts having been installed it is now a fully-fledged part of the Bansko ski area (this is the ‘Chalin Valog’ area on the piste map). One obvious downside to all the development and increasing popularity is there are more people using the slopes, and the main gondola up from town is notorious for horrendous queues during busy periods e.g. British school holidays. We didn’t experience this as we went there outside of the peak season – might be wise to do the same!

The pistes are mostly intermediate and advanced riders will quickly exhaust them, but there’s plenty of tree skiing to be found instead and though we didn’t try them the resort is said to have some excellent out-of-bounds runs – which are also said to be very easy to get lost on if you don’t know exactly where you’re going or have a local or instructor to guide you.

The town itself, while being a bit rough around the edges in some parts and resembling a giant building site in others, has an Eastern European charm in the old town with plenty of mehanas (traditional Bulgarian taverns) and definitely gives you something a little different to the established resorts elsewhere in Europe… we had a couple of fairly messy nights in said taverns! Access is via Sofia, requiring a bus transfer of several hours from the airport – which itself is a 3-hour flight if you’re coming from the UK – so it is a bit of an effort to get there.

Bansko Summary

Although it can’t compete with the more famous resorts of the Alps, Bansko does offer good lift infrastructure, a range of freestyle offerings, and a decent enough variety of terrain to keep you interested for a one-week trip; and, despite getting more expensive it’s still cheaper than the Alps. So is it the new Andorra? Well, since Andorra’s ski areas were linked up, Bansko gives you less terrain, and requires a longer flight with a similarly long bus transfer. But it’s cheaper than Andorra, and I think the terrain is more varied with tree-skiing available off-piste; more importantly, you probably have better odds of good snow in Bansko than you do in Andorra.

Useful Links for Riding at Bansko

Homepage and piste map

Snow Forecast for Bansko

Portes du Soleil (France & Switzerland)

Les Portes du Soleil is, by some measures, the largest ski area on the planet. It’s definitely the largest one I’ve experienced, and is larger than anything outside Europe – its only rivals to the title are Paradiski (Les Arcs) and the 3 Valleys (both in France), depending how one chooses to define ‘largest’ (i.e. using total surface area, total skiable area, or total distance of the combined length of a resort’s runs)

Les Portes du Soleil straddles the border of France and Switzerland – it was created through the merger of around a dozen French and Swiss resorts and encompasses multiple towns in both countries, any of which can be used as a base for skiing in the area. One of these towns is Morzine on the French side, and at the end of my season in Austria I bought an Interrail ticket and took the train across Austria, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland to France to visit my brother who’d spent the season in Morzine. I’d thought Mayrhofen was big, but it’s way smaller than the Portes du Soleil.

Mountain stats
Highest lifted point: 2466m
Lowest skiable point: 1000m
Vertical drop: 1000m*
Lifts: 201
Runs: 300
Total run length: 650km
Longest run: 8km
Ski area size: massive! 10,000+ hectares

(*this is the greatest vertical drop available for a single run, rather than for the ski area overall. The highest and lowest points are located in different areas and cannot be done as a single top-to-bottom run)

Homepage and piste map

We mostly rode the Morzine / Avoriaz section and also over the border into the Champery zone on the Swiss side. This ski area really is truly massive; you could spend the whole day skiing across it from one side to the other, and then loop around and take a different route back.

The border itself is cool – one of the ‘crossings’ was simply a little wooden hut, with a sign saying ‘border’, stuck on top of a mountain ridge with a chairlift coming up from either side. No guards, no passports, you just come off the lift and ski off down the other side, and hey you’ve switched countries! The most famous route from France into Switzerland is via the run named La Chavanette (or in English simply ‘The Wall’), a steep, icy slope covered in car-sized moguls.

This being my first season I hadn’t really started riding park yet (especially with Mayrhofen not having a beginner park at the time) but my brother’s a far better rider and a bit of a park monkey, so I did have a good look at some of the parks in Portes du Soleil while he hit the booters. We went to the beginner park & intermediate park in Morzine, and a monster park in Champery (I think?!) with the biggest table top I’ve ever seen (the conditions weren’t good and no-one was touching the big stuff that day). As for the eight or nine other zones that constitute the Portes du Soleil – I never even saw them, and they’re home to several more parks. So it’s safe to say there’s plenty of freestyle action to be had, along with the hundreds of miles of piste.

Basically, you could ride here for weeks without getting bored of the same old runs. There are seven parks, three pipes, four bordercross courses, and every type of terrain you could ask for. There is a downside though, which is that it’s all so spread out – unlike Whistler, which has all of the above packed in to a relatively compact area, skiing at Portes du Soleil can involve a lot of chairlifts and boring runs to get across to the bits you want to ride. Also, despite the enormous size of the ski area, it’s fairly low-lying (for the Alps) and doesn’t have the kind of one-run vertical drop available in places like Chamonix, Revelstoke, Whistler, and so on. Although the vert is still decent, it doesn’t match the overall size. With that said, it’s an awesome ski area, and Morzine is a nice little French Alpine town with good accommodation, facilities, restaurants, bars and clubs… Avoriaz, the town perched at the top of the cliffs above Morzine, is more of a purpose-built resort with little to no charm, but there you can ski in & out instead of coming up from Morzine via a series of lifts and runs. As for the other dozen or so towns in and around Les Portes du Soleil… again, I never even saw them!

Useful Links for Les Portes du Soleil

Homepage and piste map

Snow Forecast for Avoriaz

Cairngorm Mountain (Scotland)

The UK isn’t at the top of any lists when it comes to skiing destinations, and most British skiers and snowboarders can be found getting their snow fix in Austria, Canada, Bulgaria, and elsewhere. However, the Scottish Highlands are home to five ski areas (see here for details of them all), which although quite small by European standards are of a respectable size globally. The Cairngorm Mountain ski area near Aviemore is the second largest ski area in Scotland (behind Glenshee), and was the second place I ever tried snowboarding.

Mountain stats
Highest lifted point: 1145m
Lowest skiable point: 645m
Vertical drop: 500m
Lifts: 15
Runs: 28
Total run length: 32km
Longest run: 3.5km
Ski area size: 598 hectares

Homepage and piste map

It was only my second time snowboarding, and in the early days when you’re still learning it’s hard to judge one ski area against another, at least from a skiing point of view. What I can say is that the facilities were good and the views were outstanding. The ski area’s located in the Cairngorm national park, and that area of Scotland is simply stunning – the mountains reflected in the lochs make for great photo opportunities. We stayed in the nearby town of Aviemore (the ski area itself doesn’t have accommodations) from where it’s a 10-minute drive to the ski area. To get there we’d driven up from Liverpool (where we were all university students at the time), a 7-or-so-hour drive, and the final leg after Edinburgh has you driving through gorgeous scenery on empty roads – a driver’s dream!

We’d only gone up for the weekend, driving on Friday, two days riding, and then the idea was to drive back on Monday. Those first two days had us scraping around on bullet proof ice, with the wind challenging gravity to determine which direction we would go… not an awful lot of fun, but the sun was out and at least we had those fantastic views to take in. And then on the Monday we awoke to six inches of fresh powder, with more still falling; the room was booked for one more night, Tuesday lectures were written off, and we got one more day of riding in. The visibility was terrible for most of the day, but the fresh deep snow made up for the previous two days.

It’s a pretty small ski area by European standards, but would be considered a decent size in e.g. New Zealand or Japan. Still, good riders will have it skied out in a couple of hours and furthermore the snow conditions are usually poor (our lucky third day notwithstanding). So would I recommend going to Aviemore to ski? To be honest, only if you are already in Scotland. Even from northern England it’s quite a long way to drive and you’d be better off with a cheap flight to France or Austria, and from London it’s no contest – London is actually physically closer to the Alps than it is to the Scottish Highlands, and the Alps offer so much more terrain and almost always better snow. But with that said, the folks at Cairngorm Mountain do a good job with what they’ve got and if the snow’s good you can have a good day’s riding. In any case, I always recommend any visitor to the UK to make time for Scotland; it’s just an achingly beautiful place. It’s probably best to go in summer so you can enjoy some hiking and hopefully have reasonable weather, but if you’re visiting in winter then may as well have a day on the slopes while you’re at it.

Useful Links for Cairngorm Mountain

Homepage and piste map

Snow Forecast for Cairngorm