Hotel Portillo opened in 1949, a 125-room landmark built by the Chilean government in a notch of the cordillera the locals called the "little pass." In 1961 the state sold it to two Americans, and the resort has stayed in private hands since, run with the clubby intimacy of a place that takes only a few hundred guests at a time. The setting does the heavy lifting. The hotel faces the Laguna del Inca, a long ribbon of meltwater that glows an improbable blue-green even when the surrounding peaks are buried in snow. Folklore gives the lake its melancholy: an Inca prince named Illi Yunqui is said to have laid his bride, Princess Kora-Illé, to rest in its waters after she fell during a wedding ceremony, and the lake supposedly took its color from her eyes.

Portillo's owners wanted the world to notice their new resort, so they made an audacious bid to host the 1966 Alpine World Ski Championships, the first time the event would ever come to the Southern Hemisphere. Then the mountain nearly ended the dream. A year before the races, a ferocious storm battered the Andes with winds reported near 200 kilometers an hour, triggering avalanches that tore out almost every newly installed lift. The resort rebuilt in less than twelve months. In August 1966, the head of the international ski federation stood alongside Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva to open the championships. Nearly sixty years later, it remains the only time the worlds have been staged below the equator.

Portillo's terrain rewards people who can actually ski. Open powder bowls spill straight off the lifts into off-piste lines, and the resort runs some of the only "slingshot" lifts on Earth: the va-et-vient, a bar that fires several skiers uphill at once across slopes too steep and avalanche-prone for ordinary chairs. Backcountry powder waits just beyond the road, with almost no competition for the lines. The reward at altitude is a view that stops conversation. Helicopters lift sightseers over the ridgelines, and on a clear day the white pyramid of Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Americas, fills the windows just across the Argentine frontier.

Because there is nowhere else to go, the social life folds inward. Hotel Portillo runs all-inclusive, serving four meals a day with a famous, almost comic efficiency, and the unofficial house drink is the pisco sour, the grape-brandy cocktail that doubles as Chile's national pour. An outdoor pool steams in the cold, warmed by the mountain's own geothermal heat, an absurd and wonderful contrast to the snowfields above. After midnight, staff and locals gather at La Posada just outside the hotel, where the night runs late and the altitude makes everything feel a little more vivid than it should.