They started with little snow and have finished low. Written like that, it sounds like a guaranteed disaster. On the contrary, the 2022/2023 ski season lowers the blind with a very positive balance. And it happens in one of the driest winters experienced in Spain and with the debate, alive as never before, on the consequences of climate change.
The snow businessmen had a difficult time at the beginning of this season to repeat the figures of the previous season. The influx of skiers in all the resorts of the Pyrenees –after the forced stoppage due to the pandemic– was record high in 2021/22.
The balance of this winter is, therefore, much more positive than the omens released at the beginning of December, when skiing started. The mountain resorts managed by Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya (La Molina, Vall de Núria, Vallter, Espot, Port Ainé and Boí Taüll) closed the season with a total of 830,000 ski days sold. 1% more ski passes than last year's campaign. Among these complexes, the good results of the Alta Ribagorça resort stand out, with almost 30% more skiers (172,702) than in the 2021/22 season. Baqueira-Beret has once again been the busiest resort in the Catalan Pyrenees. The Aranese complex is only 10,000 ski passes away from the million days of skiing. "This has been the second best season in history (990,032 visitors) with 136 days of full operation," they say from Baqueira.
The weather has been kinder on the southern slopes of the Pyrenees, but this positive balance would not have been possible "without the great effort of the entire mountain team to offer optimal snow quality," they add from the Aranese station. And they stress that after last season's historical records, this season, with a much less favorable climate, "the numbers of last winter have been touched".
Masella, in La Cerdanya, closes the season with almost 380,000 skiers. A figure lower than that of last year, "but positive, since it was difficult to match last year's record with the weather this winter," they say from that complex.
The Aragonese stations of the Aramón Group also make a positive balance of this atypical season due to the lack of desired rainfall. Around 1,100,000 skiers have passed through these complexes, a figure similar to that of the last campaign.
After a difficult start to the campaign, everything changed on January 8. "The snow that has fallen and the low temperatures registered since that date have provided an exceptional quality of snow in almost the entire ski area of the resorts," they affirm from Aramon. "These conditions were maintained until the middle of March and the influx of skiers was exceptional, especially on the weekends of a month of February, with a historical record of influx," he added.
One more season it has become clear that the growing investments in these complexes in snow-making systems ensure the role of economic engine assumed by these resorts in the mountain regions. Thanks to skiing, hotel occupancies in winter remain very high near the slopes. To which must be added the thousands of jobs (even temporary) generated by this activity.
