Nevado del Ruiz

Colombia's only real ski area, on the glacier of an Andean volcano above Manizales, which hosted international championships in the 1950s and was abandoned by the mid-1960s as the ice retreated; the lift cables and towers are still up there.

Region: Caldas / Tolima
Country: Colombia
Status: abandoned
Year opened: 1951
Year closed: mid-1960s
Reason for closure: Glacier retreat and the loss of dependable snow cover. Nevado del Ruiz lost some 139.4 million cubic metres of ice between 1946 and 1954, in the very years the ski club was forming; by 1958 a championship had to be moved almost to the summit for want of snow, and organised skiing had petered out by the middle of the 1960s.

History

Nevado del Ruiz rises to 5,321 m in the Cordillera Central, between Caldas and Tolima and within what is now Los Nevados National Park, a couple of hours above Manizales. In the middle of the twentieth century its glacier was extensive enough that fresh snow would lie for a fortnight or more, and a community of Italian, Swiss and German residents of Manizales - people who had grown up skiing in the Alps - founded the Club de Esquí de Manizales, the only ski club Colombia has ever had. On 29 December 1951 the club staged the country's first national ski championship, drawing around fifty skiers from eleven countries including the United States, Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Italy, Britain, the Netherlands, Romania, Argentina and Chile; Karl Partch won and set a continental speed record. Further championships followed, including a South American event in the mid-1950s, and an international championship in 1958 that had to be held almost at the summit because there was too little snow lower down. A lift - described in Spanish accounts as a telesilla - ran from just below the refuge up to the second plateau, and a chalet served the slope. The glacier was already in steep retreat, and by the mid-1960s skiing had simply stopped. Parts of the lift survive: cables, pulleys and towers still stand on the mountain, along with historic photographs and wooden skis with bamboo poles kept at the present-day chalet. Skiing is no longer permitted in Colombian national parks, and since the volcano reactivated in 2010 it has been held at yellow alert with visitors allowed no higher than the Valle de las Tumbas at 4,400 m. Documentation is fragmentary - no source found gives the lift's specification, its builder, the exact year it was erected, or names for the ski runs.

Lifts

Name	Type	Manufacturer	Notes
Unnamed lift	Chairlift		A single lift ran from just below the mountain refuge up to the second plateau. Its type is described in Spanish sources as a telesilla, and no length, manufacturer or construction date is recorded. Cables, pulleys and towers are still standing on the mountain

Sources and further reading

Location

4.8819, -75.3178