Introduction

Los Penitentes ski resort is located 180km from Mendoza and you can see the countries highest mountain, Mount Aconcagua, from the slopes.  It is a mid-sized resort and was officially inaugurated in 1979.  It offers 28 runs varied in length and technical ability amounting to some 300has of terrain and fits in between the local resort of Vallecitos and Chile's international ski resort - Portillo.  It tends to have weekend skiers from Mendoza and holiday makers from Buenos Aires and Santa Fe.
 

Penitentas Village

Facilities and Services

Penitentes has a ski school offering skiing and snow boarding lessons to all abilities with equipment hire at the resort.  There is also a snow garden snowplay area for younger kids.

Accommodation at the resort caters for all budgets for luxury hotels to hostels.  The resort also caters for nordic and helii-skiing.

The resort is characterised by simple lifts and it can suffer from less snow than other resorts in the area such as Las Leñas and Portillo.  When snow does come however, avalanche risk can be a big problem.  Having said that a number of the runs have been approved by the FASA (Argentine Federation of Ski and Andinism) and the FIS (International Ski Federation) stage a number of competitions there.

Penitentas Piste Map

Travel

The resort can be reached directly by car along International Route 7 this is paved through its length and is the main link between Mendoza and Santiago in Chile.  National Route 40 also gives access to Mendoza and is the main arterial route through Argentina from north to south.

To fly to Penitentes, the local airport, Francisco Gabrielli is 6km from Mendoza. There are also a number of bus companies which operate services out of Mendoza to the rest of Argentina and there are regular transport services from Mendoza to Penitentes to access the ski area.