Where to Ski in July and August: Argentina Has the Deepest Snow of Any Country on Earth, and Everyone Books New Zealand

If you want to ski in July, the northern hemisphere is closed and you have four realistic countries: Argentina, Chile, New Zealand and Australia.

Here is what falls on each of them.

	Ski areas	Median snowfall
🇦🇷 Argentina	13	385 cm
🇨🇱 Chile	7	326 cm
🇦🇺 Australia	10	138 cm
🇳🇿 New Zealand	26	136 cm

The Andes get between two and three times what the antipodean fields get — Argentina’s median is 2.8 times New Zealand’s. And of the four, the two that dominate English-language coverage of the northern summer are the bottom two.

Argentina’s median beats every country we measure

Rank every country with ten or more ski areas by what its typical ski area receives:

		Ski areas	Median
1	🇦🇷 Argentina	13	385 cm
2	🇯🇵 Japan	395	268 cm
3	🇫🇷 France	250	244 cm
4	🇨🇭 Switzerland	287	236 cm
5	🇮🇹 Italy	188	201 cm
6	🇮🇷 Iran	22	200 cm
7	🇦🇹 Austria	248	192 cm
8	🇪🇸 Spain	35	183 cm
9	🇳🇴 Norway	137	181 cm
10	🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan	12	172 cm
11	🇹🇷 Turkey	11	167 cm
12	🇨🇦 Canada	172	144 cm
—	🇺🇸 United States	541	123 cm

Argentina is first, and it is not close. The typical Argentinian ski area gets 43% more snow than the typical Japanese one and more than three times the typical American one.

Thirteen ski areas is a small sample and you should hold this loosely. A median built from thirteen numbers moves if two of them are wrong. But it is not a fluke of one outlier — seven of Argentina’s thirteen ski areas are in the world’s top 200, and the country’s median being this high means the depth runs through the middle of the list rather than sitting at the top of it.

The southern hemisphere in order

All 56 ski areas we cover below the equator, top twenty:

	Ski area		Snowfall	World rank
1	Las Leñas	🇦🇷	635 cm	27
2	Corralco	🇨🇱	620 cm	29
3	Caviahue	🇦🇷	594 cm	40
4	Antillanca	🇨🇱	534 cm	60
5	Chapelco	🇦🇷	444 cm	124
6	Invincible Snowfields	🇳🇿	429 cm	136
7	Portillo	🇨🇱	416 cm	151
8	Cerro Perito Moreno	🇦🇷	412 cm	158
9	Los Penitentes	🇦🇷	393 cm	178
10	Los Puquios	🇦🇷	393 cm	178
11	Batea Mahuida	🇦🇷	385 cm	199
12	Cerro Bayo	🇦🇷	372 cm	235
13	Treble Cone	🇳🇿	337 cm	341
14	Ōhau	🇳🇿	331 cm	360
15	Valle Nevado	🇨🇱	326 cm	369
16	Chapa Verde	🇨🇱	322 cm	383
17	Fox Peak	🇳🇿	303 cm	466
18	Cerro Catedral	🇦🇷	287 cm	538
19	Roundhill	🇳🇿	253 cm	718
20	Primeros Pinos	🇦🇷	222 cm	911

Fifteen of the top twenty are in the Andes and the other five are in New Zealand. Australia does not appear at all: its best field, Perisher at 205 cm, is 22nd in the southern hemisphere and 1,033rd in the world.

What happened to Queenstown

Queenstown is the southern hemisphere’s ski capital in every sense that matters commercially — flights, beds, restaurants, a season’s worth of English-language marketing. Its two main fields:

	Snowfall	World rank
The Remarkables	152 cm	1,545
Coronet Peak	129 cm	1,811

Coronet Peak, the field in most photographs of New Zealand skiing, is 1,811th of 3,108. The world median is 152 cm: The Remarkables sits exactly on it, and Coronet Peak sits below.

This is the same pattern we found among the world’s famous resorts generally and in Japan: the places that got developed were chosen for access, not for snow. Coronet Peak is 25 minutes from a town with an international airport. That is an excellent reason to build a ski field there and not a claim about precipitation.

New Zealand’s snow is real, but it is not where the infrastructure is. The country’s snowiest ski area is Invincible Snowfields at 429 cm, a small operation near Glenorchy with no website we could find. Next is Treble Cone at 337 cm, 341st in the world and the snowiest New Zealand field a visitor is likely to have heard of — and it is two hours from Queenstown, in the Wanaka direction. The country’s snow and the country’s ski industry are not in the same place.

What to do with this

If you are travelling for snow depth, go to the Andes. Argentina and Chile hold sixteen of the southern hemisphere’s twenty snowiest ski areas, and the two at the top get more than any ski area in the Alps.

If you are travelling in July for other reasons, New Zealand is still a good trip and you should manage the snow expectation. Queenstown gives you a proper town, short transfers, and a country worth being in. What it does not give you is depth, and the marketing will not tell you that.

Weight elevation heavily in the south. Argentinian snowfall swings by a factor of 2.49 between good and bad winters — the widest of any country we measure. Height is what protects you in a thin year, which is why Portillo at 3,000 m and Valle Nevado at 3,200 m stay operable when lower fields struggle.

And check what “resort” means before you book. Several of the snowiest names above are small. Ōhau at 331 cm covers 1.87 km end to end; Invincible has no lift infrastructure of the kind a destination skier expects. Snowfall rank is one column, and it is not the same question as whether there is a mountain’s worth of skiing under it.

How this was measured

Snowfall is the three-winter mean from the ERA5 reanalysis, computed identically for all 3,108 ski areas, with the hemispheres offset so a southern winter is measured June to September and a northern one December to March. Ranks are world ranks among all 3,108.

Country medians are only as good as the count beside them. Argentina’s 385 cm rests on thirteen ski areas and Chile’s on seven — we have excluded countries with fewer than ten from the ranking table for that reason, and Chile appears only in the four-country comparison at the top. Japan’s 268 cm rests on 395. Treat the first as a strong indication and the last as a measurement.

The model understates mountain snowfall. We checked it against 63 Japanese ground stations and it returns about 56% of what they record. No equivalent check exists for us in South America or New Zealand, so the centimetres below the equator should be read as indicative and the ordering — which applies one method everywhere — as the usable part. If the understatement is worse in isolated steep terrain, as it is in Japan, then the Andes figures are conservative.

Elevation is a single point at the centre of each ski area, sampled from terrain data rather than taken from operators’ own figures. Size is the greatest distance across the mapped area on OpenStreetMap, which is missing for some areas and is a rough proxy for scale rather than a measure of skiable terrain.

New Zealand’s 26 include one indoor slope, which our model correctly reports as receiving no snow, and Manganui on Mount Taranaki at 8 cm — a real club field on an isolated volcano, and very likely a case of the grid-cell problem described above rather than a mountain that gets no snow. Removing both leaves New Zealand’s median unchanged at 136 cm.