‘I thought we were all going to die,” a voice floats up from under the table. I can hear Henry Purcell, but I can’t see him. The 90-year-old American owner of Chile’s Portillo ski resort is swapping his sneakers for ski boots, his head hunched over the buckles as he recounts the day in 1971 when Cuban leader Fidel Castro arrived unannounced for lunch.
After boasting about what little challenge the surrounding 6000m-plus peaks would pose to a climber of his calibre, Castro sat down to dine at the resort’s grand Hotel Portillo. Shortly after Castro rose to leave, a young waiter named Juan Beiza noticed he had left his pistol on his chair, so rushed outside to return it, waving the weapon after Castro in a manner that can only be described as ill-advised. He, along with Purcell and everyone else nearby, came within a whisker of being gunned down by Castro’s security guards.
If you doubt the veracity of the story, you can always ask Beiza yourself. Now the restaurant maitre d’, he’s still here after 55 years. That’s not unusual at Chile’s oldest ski resort, where the staff are as loyal as the skiers, who keep returning to the canary-yellow hotel on the lake, which is celebrating its 75th anniversary.
Portillo is a boutique resort impervious to the passage of time. Cradled in the Chilean Andes, the hotel sits on the shore of the shimmering Laguna del Inca, just 23km from Aconcagua, South America’s highest mountain. The Argentinian border is just a few kilometres away, and a chairlift crosses the main trucking route between the two countries, giving skiers a scarcely believable view of semi-trailers groaning around the tightly coiled switchbacks that twist up the vertiginous valley. The drivers toot their horns at the skiers floating above; skiers respond by dropping snowballs on the trucks.
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