Las Leñas Got 291 cm One Winter and 1,034 cm Another. Argentina's Snow Swings More Than Any Country on Earth.

The world’s snowfall ranking is a Japanese list. Of the thirty snowiest ski areas we measure, twenty-four are in Japan.

Two of the other six are in South America.

World rank	Ski area		Snowfall
27	Las Leñas	🇦🇷 Argentina	635 cm
29	Corralco	🇨🇱 Chile	620 cm
40	Caviahue	🇦🇷	594 cm
60	Antillanca	🇨🇱	534 cm
124	Chapelco	🇦🇷	444 cm
151	Portillo	🇨🇱	416 cm

Las Leñas and Corralco get more snow in an average winter than any ski area in the Alps.

But “average” is doing an enormous amount of work here

Across three winters, Las Leñas ranged from 291 cm to 1,034 cm. The good winter was three and a half times the bad one.

That is the fourth-widest swing we measure anywhere on earth, out of 1,582 ski areas that get more than 150 cm in an average year. The three above it swing between much smaller numbers — 67 to 277, 71 to 290. Las Leñas is the only place near the top of that list where both ends are serious quantities of snow.

And it is not alone in its own country.

	Ski areas	Best winter ÷ worst
Argentina	11	2.49
Italy	136	2.17
Sweden	13	1.81
Iran	17	1.80
Norway	89	1.77
Austria	180	1.73
New Zealand	10	1.69
United States	186	1.55
All 1,582		1.55

Argentina is the most variable ski country we measure. The typical Argentinian ski area’s good winter is two and a half times its bad one. The typical ski area anywhere is one and a half.

The famous ones are not the snowy ones

This will be familiar to anyone who has read what we found in Japan.

Ski area		World rank	Snowfall	Elevation
Las Leñas	🇦🇷	27	635 cm	2,600 m
Corralco	🇨🇱	29	620 cm	1,758 m
—
Valle Nevado	🇨🇱	369	326 cm	3,200 m
Cerro Catedral	🇦🇷	538	287 cm	1,611 m

Cerro Catedral is the best-known ski area in South America and 538th in the world for snowfall. Valle Nevado, the name most overseas skiers associate with Chile, is 369th.

They are not badly chosen. Catedral sits above Bariloche, which is a real town with restaurants and an airport; Valle Nevado is 3,200 m up and an hour from Santiago. Those are infrastructure and access arguments, and they are good ones. They are not snowfall arguments, and nobody should confuse the two.

What this means if you are planning a trip

If your dates are fixed, weight elevation over headline snowfall. In a country where the swing is 2.49, a season’s average tells you less than it would elsewhere. Height is the thing that protects you in a thin year — which is why Valle Nevado at 3,200 m and Portillo at 3,000 m stay operable in winters when lower resorts struggle.

If you can move your dates, Argentina is where the exceptional weeks are. High variance is only a risk when you are locked in. The same spread that produced 291 cm at Las Leñas produced 1,034 cm, and nowhere else on this scale offers that upside.

And book Las Leñas knowing which bet you are making. It is genuinely one of the thirty snowiest ski areas on the planet in a good year. In a bad one it is ordinary. Both of those are true and the average of them describes neither.

How this was measured

Snowfall is the three-winter mean from the ERA5 reanalysis, computed identically for all 3,108 ski areas on this site, with the hemispheres offset so a southern winter is measured in its own season — June to September for South America, December to March for the north.

Three winters is not many, and it matters most exactly here. A ratio built from three numbers moves a long way on one unusual year. Argentina’s 2.49 is the middle of eleven ski areas, which is enough to describe the country’s habit; Las Leñas’ 3.55 is built from three numbers at one place and should be read as “this is a volatile mountain”, not as a precise figure.

The model understates snowfall in mountains, and we can only check that against ground stations in Japan. South America has no equivalent check available to us, so treat the centimetres as indicative and the ranking — which applies the same method everywhere — as the usable part.

Elevation is a single point at the centre of each ski area, sampled from the ground rather than taken from the resorts’ own figures. Twenty South American ski areas are in our data; countries with fewer than ten qualifying ski areas are left out of the variability table.