Biggest Snowfalls This Century in Western Spain

There have been some huge snowfalls in Spain this week and unusually it is not the mountain range where the country’s biggest ski areas are that have been really dumped on.

Spain has more than 30 ski areas with about half of them, including most of the larger centres, in the Pyrenees along the country’s northeastern border.

But the others are located all over the country in other mountain ranges including the Sistema Central and the Cantabrian Mountains or Cantabrian Range that stretch for over 300 km across northern Spain, from the western limit of the Pyrenees to the Galician Massif in Galicia, along the coast of the Cantabrian Sea.

It’s small ski areas in these mountains that are reporting some of the biggest snowfalls in living memory this March, with lifts and other infrastructure buried in snow drifts.

It has just kept snowing, and snowing, with accumulations of up to 85cm (three feet) in three days reported in the past week alone.

Normally these areas often tend to close by the end of March, but with the snow now lying metres deep, it is looking like it will be a bumper spring skiing season in Spain.

The images in this report have been published by the small ski centre of Sierra de Béjar in the west,  close to the Portugese border has reported huge snowfalls all through March.  It currently has 2m on lower slopes, 2.8m on upper runs, far above the normal March stats.

Across the Portugese border, Portugal’s only ski area at Serra de Estrela is also reporting great March skiing with all runs open and all lifts operating.

Elsewhere conditions are excellent in the Spanish Pyrenees too and Spain’s highest resort, also Europe’s most southerly major ski area, Sierra Nevada down on the Mediterranean Coast, received 45cm in 72 hours at the start of the week, building now to a 4m base, the deepest in the country.  It usually stays open to the start of May.