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	348 cm
🇨🇱 Chile	11	326 cm
🇦🇺 Australia	10	168 cm
🇳🇿 New Zealand	26	144 cm

The Andes get about twice what the antipodean fields get — Argentina’s median is 2.4 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	348 cm
2	🇨🇱 Chile	11	326 cm
3	🇨🇭 Switzerland	283	253 cm
4	🇯🇵 Japan	397	249 cm
5	🇦🇹 Austria	243	226 cm
6	🇫🇷 France	244	220 cm
7	🇮🇷 Iran	22	204 cm
8	🇳🇴 Norway	135	203 cm
9	🇪🇸 Spain	34	184 cm
10	🇮🇹 Italy	177	181 cm
11	🇹🇷 Turkey	11	178 cm
12	🇦🇺 Australia	10	168 cm
13	🇩🇪 Germany	75	157 cm
14	🇨🇦 Canada	171	147 cm
15	🇳🇿 New Zealand	26	144 cm
16	🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan	12	138 cm
17	🇺🇸 United States	534	132 cm

Argentina is first and Chile is second — the two Andean countries sit above every northern-hemisphere ski nation. The typical Argentinian ski area gets 40% more snow than the typical Japanese one and more than two and a half 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 — six 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 60 ski areas we cover below the equator, top twenty:

	Ski area		Snowfall	World rank
1	Nevados de Chillán	🇨🇱	752 cm	3
2	Corralco	🇨🇱	649 cm	=26
3	Caviahue	🇦🇷	584 cm	47
4	Antillanca	🇨🇱	577 cm	48
5	Cerro Perito Moreno	🇦🇷	476 cm	=93
6	Chapelco	🇦🇷	472 cm	=95
7	Las Leñas	🇦🇷	469 cm	=97
8	Batea Mahuida	🇦🇷	437 cm	=122
9	Invincible Snowfields	🇳🇿	392 cm	=190
10	Cerro Bayo	🇦🇷	387 cm	197
11	Cerro Catedral	🇦🇷	348 cm	=287
12	Chapa Verde	🇨🇱	332 cm	=345
13	Lagunillas	🇨🇱	328 cm	=363
14	Portillo	🇨🇱	326 cm	=378
15	Los Puquios	🇦🇷	314 cm	=430
16	Pucón	🇨🇱	301 cm	=476
17	Los Penitentes	🇦🇷	300 cm	=482
18	Ōhau	🇳🇿	290 cm	=521
19	Fox Peak	🇳🇿	285 cm	=545
20	Treble Cone	🇳🇿	282 cm	=561

Valle Nevado, El Colorado and La Parva share one grid cell at 278 cm and come next, 21st to 23rd.

Sixteen of the top twenty are in the Andes and the other four are in New Zealand. Australia does not appear at all: its best field, Charlotte Pass at 219 cm, is 26th in the southern hemisphere and =966th 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	142 cm	=1,775
Coronet Peak	116 cm	=2,148

Coronet Peak, the field in most photographs of New Zealand skiing, is =2,148th of 3,069. The world median is 161 cm: both Queenstown fields sit below it.

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 392 cm, a small operation near Glenorchy with no website we could find. Treble Cone, at 282 cm and =561st in the world, is the snowiest New Zealand field a visitor is likely to have heard of — Ōhau (290 cm) and Fox Peak (285 cm) sit just above it — 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 top of that list — Nevados de Chillán at 752 cm — is third in the world.

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. Andes snowfall swings widely between good and bad winters — over twelve winters, the typical Chilean ski area’s best winter was about four and a half times its worst and the typical Argentine one’s three and a half, against about twice for the best-known Japanese resorts. 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 290 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 twelve-winter mean from the ERA5 reanalysis, computed identically for all 3,069 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 3,069.

Country medians are only as good as the count beside them. Argentina’s 348 cm rests on thirteen ski areas and Chile’s on eleven — both only just clear the ten-ski-area floor we require for the ranking table. Japan’s 249 cm rests on 397. 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 the figure mapped on OpenStreetMap for each ski area. 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 9 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 raises New Zealand’s median from 144 cm to 148 cm.

Sources: Open-Meteo historical weather data, based on the ERA5 reanalysis (Copernicus Climate Change Service); OpenSkiMap, map data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).