Portillo — Portillo Map Poster & Print

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Portillo Map Poster & Print

Portillo sits high in the Andes just below the pass that carries the road between Santiago and Mendoza, a few kilometres from the Argentine border. From above there is very little built form: one long hotel, a handful of lodges, a scatter of lift lines, and the dark oval of the Laguna del Inca filling the valley floor. Everything else is contour, scree and snow, which gives the map an unusually spare, almost diagrammatic quality.

The approach is the part people remember. On the Chilean side the international road climbs a stack of tight switchbacks, known locally as Los Caracoles, before levelling out beside the lake. On a Portillo map poster those hairpins read as a coiled line folded against the slope, the most intricate drawing on the sheet and a sharp contrast to the empty mountain faces around it.

Portillo has a long place in skiing history. In 1966 it hosted the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships, the first held in the Southern Hemisphere, and its steep couloirs have drawn serious skiers ever since. The resort has stayed deliberately small, so the map is less about development than about setting: a lake, a pass, a road and some of the highest mountains in the Americas.