Beat the ski crush in Spain

Heading to the slopes at half-term is often all queues and crowds — but not in the Pyrenees, as Simon Calder reports
Royal resort: Baqueira Beret is popular with the Spanish monarchy (Picture: Age Fotostock/Alamy)
Simon Calder16 February 2015

No activity binds parents and children together so well as the sometimes graceful, often awkward, always engrossing business of sliding down a snow-covered mountainside. Repeat daily for a week and you should all be happily exhausted before the unappetising business of battling home through a trail of queues and crowds. Particularly if you are travelling at half-term.

The week’s break, which for most schools starts this weekend, triggers a surge in numbers at every stage of the trip: the lines at Gatwick are matched by those at Geneva and Grenoble airports, at the ski lifts at resorts across the Alps, and on the slopes, as you shiver while you queue for the chance to ascend.

Not if you head for northern Spain. If there is a less-busy airport in Europe than Lleida–Alguaire I have yet to find it. The £100 million facility was conceived when Spain was thriving economically, and creating infrastructure like there was no tomorrow. In the first year it handled fewer passengers than Gatwick sees in a morning. But it staggers on, with a peak on Sunday, when Thomas Cook Airlines charters arrive from Gatwick and Manchester.

Having flown south for 100 minutes, you travel north by bus for 200 minutes. The road swerves through spectacular scenery, clinging to the cliff beside precipitous canyons. The rock is the colour of Demerara sugar. Only when close to the Pyrenean watershed — marking the Franco-Spanish border — does the snow cover go beyond a light dusting.

Just as you reach what appears to be the highest point — and surely, by definition, the frontier — something odd happens. You start heading downhill, along a tunnel that was hacked through the rock by Republican prisoners captured by Franco’s fascists in the Spanish Civil War. You emerge into a calm valley that is French geographically, part of the Spanish nation, under Catalan jurisdiction and where the language is Aranese.

The mountains have incubated the culture of Val d’Aran, making it one of the most fascinating communities in Spain. Head east from the main town, Vielha, towards the resort of Baqueira, and you run through rugged hamlets with a history of subsistence agriculture augmented by the odd bit of smuggling and chronicled in a strange mountain tongue with roots in French and Catalan.

On our first morning skiing, we arrived at the lift just after a school party had turned up, and waited one minute, possibly two, before clambering into a cabin. That was the longest “queue” we experienced in the entire week.

Catalan charm: Val d’Aran is dotted with rugged hamlets and rippling hills (Picture: Gonzalo Azumendi/Getty)

To describe the terrain from memory — rather than reaching for the piste map or family snaps — is easier than for any other ski resort I have ever visited. A curl of rock starts benignly enough, providing an exceptionally gentle nursery area. Gradually the gradient stiffens, though with enough undulations to provide platforms for resting and taking in the grand sweep across the valley — or just soaking up the Spanish sun, which smiled down for the first five days. The ridge was a jagged blade of rock that screamed “danger”, but the father and son who were on the same package as us rated it the best place on earth.

Exhilarating gullies embroidered with curving veins of rock required maximum concentration. But to soothe away the fear — and for views of rippling hills on the far side of the valley — there was always a wide, fast piste no more than one chairlift away. Indeed, the infrastructure seemed an allegory for Spain’s flagging economy: top quality, expensive, but almost empty.

The Spanish royal family likes its holidays, and has impeccable taste: Baqueira is the resort of kings. I didn’t meet a monarch, nor even a crown prince, but I did get better at skiing.Some years I seem to regress, but I was lucky enough to be assigned Dixie through the Baqueira British Ski School. He is the chap you need in a crisis; he discreetly took into account my fear of heights, deftly inviting me to follow his every swerve and ski-pole plant as though we were conjoined, making neat parallel turns down gradients that would normally terrify me.

With the rest of the British skiing community compressed into the Alps, you have the chance properly to appreciate the mountains. What’s not to like? Well, our hotel, the Tur Blanc, was just what you want for a ski base: nothing flashy, well-run, mountainous breakfasts, reasonably priced beer in the bar. But every evening at 7.45pm we convened outside the locked door of the restaurant until we were allowed in on the dot of eight.

The superb salad buffet took one heck of a beating so we had something to scoff while waiting for our artistically outstanding main courses. I’m embarrassed to say I have no notes about the elaborate dishes we were served, because they disappeared like a novice down a Double Black gully.

On a different holiday such gastronomical miracles would be better appreciated, but after the kind of luck we enjoyed each day on the slopes, we craved simplicity and rapidity: pasta and pizza at 6pm trumps swordfish with an almond reduction. And on the subject of reductions, basic Italian fodder would have cut the cost of a holiday in the resort of royalty.

In short, that is why we aren’t going there again this weekend — the price. This half-term we are boarding the same flight to the same airport and driving north along the same road into the Pyrenees, but then bearing right and aiming for Andorra — same mountains, lower cost. I’ll let you know.

Details: Spain

Simon Calder paid £1,314pp for a family of four for a week in Baqueira Beret, including Thomas Cook Airlines flights from Gatwick to Lleida, transfers and half-board accommodation at the Tuc Blanc, through Neilson (0845 070 3460; neilson.co.uk). Lessons through Baqueira British Ski School (01903 233323; bbskischool.co.uk) cost a further £139 per person.

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