Hotel Portillo - The Yellow Hotel at the Edge of the Andes

There's a St. Bernard named Petra who wanders the lobby looking for belly rubs. The walls are covered in autographed photos of skiing legends. There are no televisions in the rooms. The road in has 39 switchbacks and occasionally gets buried under avalanche debris. And yet people come back here, year after year, for generations.

Hotel Portillo, the iconic yellow and blue fortress perched at 9,300 feet in the Chilean Andes, is not trying to be fashionable. It doesn't need to be.

Location

Portillo sits in a high-alpine valley in the heart of the Andes Mountains, about two and a half hours from Santiago under ideal conditions. The resort straddles the Chilean side of the border with Argentina, at an altitude where the air is thin and the light does strange, beautiful things to the surrounding peaks.

There is no town here. No shops outside the hotel. No restaurant down the street. Just mountains, snow, and the shimmering Laguna del Inca - the Lake of the Inca - which shifts in color from emerald green to deep blue depending on the time of day.

Getting here is part of the adventure and, frankly, part of the commitment. The access road is narrow, slide-prone, and shared with lines of 18-wheelers waiting at the Argentine border crossing. When heavy snow hits, the road closes entirely. Some shuttle rides from Santiago have stretched to eight-plus hours. Occasionally, the only way in is by helicopter - which, as arrivals go, is admittedly hard to beat.

Built by Ambition, Tested by Avalanche

Portillo is the oldest ski resort in South America, and it carries that distinction with the quiet confidence of a place that knows exactly what it is. Norwegian engineers conducting railway surveys first crossed these slopes on skis in 1887 and 1888, making them almost certainly the first people to ski what would eventually become the resort. The Trans-Andean railway, inaugurated in 1910, doubled as the region's first ski lift, carrying adventurers up into the mountains.

A small mountain hut evolved into the current hotel building, constructed by the Chilean government and inaugurated in 1949. The government privatized it in 1961 - one of the first state businesses in Chilean history to be sold to the private sector - and it was purchased by two Americans, Bob Purcell and Dick Aldrich, who recognized what the Andes could become for serious skiers.

The Purcell family has owned Portillo ever since, and they are still on site. In 1966, Portillo made history as the only South American resort ever to host the FIS World Ski Championships - an achievement that required rebuilding nearly the entire lift infrastructure after a catastrophic storm in 1965 brought winds of 125 mph and triggered avalanches that destroyed most of what had just been built. Bob Purcell personally assured the FIS the resort would be ready, and it was.

In 1978, speed skier Steve McKinney set a world record here, becoming the first person to reach 200 kph (124 mph) on skis. The resort installed the first snowmaking machines in South America in 1994. In 2019, it celebrated its 70th anniversary. The wooden doors guests walk through today are the same ones that have been opening since 1949.

The Restaurant

Four meals a day are included in the all-inclusive packages, and they are served in a dining room that would feel at home in a classic European mountain hotel: chandeliers overhead, white linen on the tables, formally dressed waiters moving between them. You are assigned your own table for the week, which sounds like a small thing but quickly becomes one of the rhythms that makes a stay here feel less like a hotel and more like a temporary life.

Breakfast is a generous two-course affair before you head to the slopes. Lunch, back in the same dining room, stretches to three courses. The cooking is more sophisticated than the altitude might lead you to expect: swordfish, octopus, tuna carpaccio, lamb, and serious desserts appear regularly on the menu. Chilean wines feature prominently.

The dining room faces the lake and the slopes, so even as you're eating, the Andes are right there through the windows - the "Tres Hermanos" peaks catching the afternoon light, the surface of Laguna del Inca shifting through its palette of blues and greens. It's a view that earns its place on any list of the world's great restaurant settings.

If you'd rather not come back inside at midday, the mountain restaurant Tío Bob's serves lunch on the slopes with views of Lake Inca and the surrounding 14,000-foot peaks. Their cheeseburgers are excellent.

The Piano Bar

The Piano Bar gets going around 7 p.m., providing the backdrop to pre-dinner drinks and the particular energy of a room full of people who have spent all day skiing hard at altitude. First dinner seating follows at 8 - late by American standards, but this is Latin America.

After dinner, the bar transforms. A band sets up most evenings, running through sets that lean toward rock and jazz, and the atmosphere tips into something looser and more festive. The Portillo Disco, located on the lower level near the fitness center, opens Sunday through Friday at 5 p.m. and Saturdays at 7 p.m., staying open until 2 a.m. for anyone with legs left after the day's skiing.

The classic drink order here is a Pisco Sour, the Chilean national cocktail, which tastes considerably better at this altitude than it has any right to.

The Rooms

The hotel has 123 rooms spread across the second through sixth floors, divided between lake views and valley views. Lake View rooms look out over Laguna del Inca and the Tres Hermanos mountains, including some of the ski runs, and offer some of the best sunrise and sunset watching in the Andes. Valley View rooms face the surrounding peaks and snowy bowl that cradles the resort.

The sixth-floor rooms are larger, come with balconies and panoramic views, and require walking up one flight of stairs since the elevator only reaches the fifth floor. Suites, located on the second and sixth floors, have king beds, separate living rooms, and balconies with lake views.

For families or groups, the Family Apartments connect two bedrooms - one with a standard bed, one with bunk beds - and can accommodate up to six people with either lake or valley views.

Standard amenities include high-speed Wi-Fi, a minibar, in-room safe, toiletries, and a hair dryer. What you will not find is a television. This is a deliberate choice, and after the first day, you probably won't miss it.

The Pools

After skiing, the outdoor heated pool and oversized hot tubs are where Portillo's social life really happens. The pool runs between 87 and 91 degrees Fahrenheit; the hot tubs between 97 and 101.

Both look directly out at Laguna del Inca and the peaks that ring the valley, making the post-ski soak something genuinely worth planning your afternoon around. Waiters circulate with drinks. The classic order is another Pisco Sour.

The pool and hot tubs are open daily from noon to 8 p.m., which neatly aligns with the window between the ski day winding down and dinner cranking up.

In the late afternoon, when the sun drops behind the mountains and the sky turns colors over the lake, this is one of the finer places to be doing nothing in particular anywhere in South America.

The Skiing

Portillo has 1,235 acres of skiable terrain across 35 slopes, with a base elevation of 2,800 meters and a high point of 3,310 meters. The longest run is 2.5 kilometers, and 80 percent of days are sunny.

Annual snowfall averages just over five meters. The terrain breaks down as 15 percent beginner, 30 percent intermediate, 30 percent advanced, and 25 percent expert - a distribution that skews toward the challenging end.

The beginner and intermediate runs are groomed nightly, and a snowmaking system installed in 1994 ensures a reliable base on the main runs. The advanced and expert terrain is what draws the serious skiers: open bowls and chutes that accumulate soft snow and see minimal traffic.

Because the resort caps occupancy at 450 guests and sells only a limited number of day tickets, lift lines are genuinely rare - the kind of rare that feels almost suspicious if you're used to skiing anywhere in North America or Europe.

The resort's slingshot lifts - a Portillo signature - are worth knowing about before you arrive. They are unlike anything at standard resorts and are not recommended for the timid or the uncoordinated.

Heli-skiing is available for those who want to push further into the Andes, with runs dropping 2,000 to 3,000 vertical feet from 14,000-foot peaks into untracked powder. Sign up as soon as you arrive; spots go quickly and flights only happen when conditions cooperate.

The ski patrol team manages mountain safety throughout the area, overseeing avalanche terrain control and slope conditions. Obey the closures, and if you're uncertain about anything, ask.