The World's Second Snowiest Ski Area Is a Chilean Volcano With No English Wikipedia Page

We measure snowfall the same way at 3,112 ski areas. Here is the top of that list.

	Ski area		Snowfall
1	Okutadami Maruyama	🇯🇵	796 cm
2	Nevados de Chillán	🇨🇱	780 cm
3	FONNA Glacier	🇳🇴	771 cm
4	Shames Mountain	🇨🇦	765 cm
=5	Iwappara	🇯🇵	755 cm

One ski area on earth gets more snow than Nevados de Chillán, and it is a Japanese hill that stays shut for most of the winter because the access road is buried.

Nevados de Chillán has a Spanish Wikipedia article. It has no English one.

It is also unusually steady

Big snowfall averages in South America usually come with enormous swings. Argentina is the most variable ski country we measure, and Las Leñas — the name most associated with deep Andean snow — ranged from 291 cm to 1,034 cm across three winters.

Chillán did not do that.

	Worst winter	Best winter	Ratio
Nevados de Chillán 🇨🇱	666 cm	849 cm	1.27×
Corralco 🇨🇱	516 cm	736 cm	1.43×
Okutadami Maruyama 🇯🇵	672 cm	945 cm	1.41×
Las Leñas 🇦🇷	291 cm	1,034 cm	3.55×

Its worst winter of the three was still 666 cm — more than any ski area in the Alps gets in an average year. A 1.27 ratio is steadier than the median of 1.55 across the 1,573 ski areas we can measure this on.

That combination — very high and quite steady — is rare, and it is the opposite of the Argentinian pattern.

The catch is the temperature

Snowfall totals do not tell you what the snow is like. We measure that separately, and here the two measurements disagree completely.

Snowfall rank	2nd of 3,112
Snow-quality rank	338th of 454
Average temperature when snow falls	+0.3 °C
Days with rain	22%

The average snowfall day at Nevados de Chillán is above freezing. It is the only ski area we have written about where that is true. Snow falling at +0.3 °C is heavy and wet, it consolidates fast, and more than one winter day in five brings rain instead.

This is what the Chilean lake district does. These are volcanoes a short distance from the Pacific, and the same ocean air that delivers extraordinary quantities of precipitation delivers it warm. Corralco, 30th in the world for snowfall, is 248th for quality on the same measurement. The pattern is regional, not a quirk of one mountain.

For comparison, the dry central Andes 400 km north — Portillo, Valle Nevado, El Colorado — get roughly half as much snow and see rain on 2–3% of winter days.

What this is actually worth

If you want volume, this is the second best place on earth, and it is not close to being crowded. 780 cm a season on a volcano with lifts, and no English encyclopedia entry to its name.

Do not expect Hokkaido snow. At +0.3 °C you are skiing heavy, dense snow that sets up quickly. That is a different sport from what the Japan footage shows, and it is worth deciding which one you are booking.

Go high on the mountain. Our figure describes the resort’s base elevation at around 1,700 m. The complex rises well above that, and every 100 m of height is worth roughly 0.65 °C — which, at an average of +0.3 °C, is the difference between wet snow and dry.

And if you are choosing between Chile’s regions, they are two different countries as far as snow goes. The lake-district volcanoes have the depth. The central Andes above Santiago have the quality. We ranked them all.

How this was measured

Snowfall is the three-winter mean from the ERA5 reanalysis, computed identically for all 3,112 ski areas, with the southern winter measured June to September. The model understates mountain snowfall — against 63 Japanese ground stations it returns about 56% of what they record — so 780 cm is a floor rather than a measurement, and the ranking is the part that carries.

One limit deserves stating plainly, because it is large here. A reanalysis grid cell is roughly 30 km across, and the figure a ski area gets depends heavily on the elevation the model assigns its cell. Chillán’s cell sits at 1,700 m. Sample the model 5 km south, where the cell sits at about 1,300 m, and it returns 426 cm instead of 780. Sample 8 km east, at about 2,100 m, and it returns 857 cm.

We use the point at the ski centre itself, and the elevation the model reports there matches the resort’s base. That is the correct choice and it is the same choice we make everywhere. But a second-place finish built on one grid cell is more fragile than a second-place finish would sound, and you should read it as “this is one of the snowiest ski areas on earth” rather than as a precise position.

Three winters is a short record, though the narrow 666–849 cm range makes the steadiness claim more robust here than the same claim would be elsewhere.

The snow-quality measure combines temperature on snow days, how often 5 cm or more falls, how often it rains instead, and wind, multiplied rather than added. The weightings are our judgement, not a result. Temperature is corrected for elevation elsewhere in that dataset; at Chillán no correction applies, because the model’s elevation and the ski area’s are the same. Our quality measurement covers 454 ski areas — the 395 in Japan and 59 below the equator — so a rank out of 454 is a position within that set, not a world ranking.

We checked for an English Wikipedia article through Wikidata, which links the Spanish article and no other language edition.