beyondbrics

It’s late July in Patagonia and the skiing season is at its peak – a time for Argentines to take advantage of the magnificent scenery and the school holidays to get down a few runs. Not this year, though.

For six weeks now a volcano in neighbouring Chile has been spewing ash into the Argentine sky, grounding flights and keeping airports closed and skiers, well, piste off.

A recent NASA satellite image showed the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano still disgorging ashes over Argentina. ”The economic situation is critical,” says Julián Arostegui, vice-president of the Cerro Bayo ski resort, located 35km northeast of the volcano in Villa La Angostura.

This lakeside Andean gem is usually crammed with skiers packing the slopes, hotels and restaurants. But now it is ghostly with locals walking down streets wearing face masks and goggles to protect themselves from the ashes. ”The snow finally came last week and we were all happy. But the truth is that when the wind blows, we get ashes again. We cannot open the ski resort under such uncertainty,” Arostegui says.

Tourism is the town’s main money-maker. This season, Villa La Angostura is expecting to lose $20m in cancelled hotel reservations and other lost revenues such as lift passes, skiing classes and equipment rental. Of the town’s 12,000 inhabitants, 2,000 have already left, hoping to find jobs elsewhere, as many depend on the brief June through September ski season.

Slightly further away from the abrasive volcano is Bariloche, one of the most popular mountain holiday destinations in Patagonia. Its ski resort, the Cerro Catedral, finally opened the lifts on July 16 – a month later than usual, in the peak of the high-season.

“I was truly desperate before the opening. Now things are slightly better; at least I am working an average of two hours a day,” says Adrián Volpini, an experienced ski instructor, who used to teach an average of six hours a day every July. ”But sometimes the ashes come back and the mountain cannot open, it’s like a plague,” he adds.

Bariloche’s airport is still closed. The city and its nearby slopes usually host about 250,000 tourists this time of the year. Now it is operating with an 18 per cent hotel occupancy rate. Despite newly arranged charter flights to nearby airports with connecting buses, the city is only expecting a tenth of the over 50,000 big-spending Brazilians who have come in recent winters to take advantage of their strong currency. Last week the local government estimated Bariloche had already lost over $150m this year.

Analysts estimate the airline industry could lose about $50m, with the state-run Aerolíneas Argentinas and Chile’s Lan – which operate most of the southern cone routes – standing to lose the most. But Brazilian, US and European carriers are also affected. ”We are doing everything we can, but we cannot beat the rage of a volcano,” says Marcela Cuesta, a director at the national government’s institute for tourism promotion.

Argentine President Cristina Fernández has already declared a regional economic emergency in Patagonia, doubling assistance and delaying tax payments for tourism-related business that do not fire personnel. All of this at a time when Argentina’s economy is booming on the back of consumer spending.

The flipside is that the ashes down south in Patagonia have been a boon for other ski resorts up north, such as the moon-like Las Leñas valley in Mendoza and, right across the border in Chile, Portillo and Valle Nevado. Not, of course, that Chileans would want to rub salt, let alone ash, into their neighbours’ wounds.

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