Swimming above the Lake of the Incas provides an incredibly scenic place to relax after a day on Portillo's slopes
Update: Portillo, located about 100 miles from Santiago, Chile's capital city, escaped the recent earthquake with only minor damage, with the resort's lifts and slopes unharmed. For additional information on the quake's effects and how to make relief donations, go here.
Way up in the Chilean Andes, Henry Purcell watches the U.S. Men’s Ski Team running gates on the treeless slopes of Portillo and wistfully recalls first coming here in 1961.
“I needed a map to find Chile,” says the 74-year-old Purcell, whose rugged face mirrors the granite spires that dot the Andean terrain. “Like most Americans of that time, I had no concept of geography. Portillo was a six-hour train ride from Santiago, with no road access and no communications. My uncle, Bob Purcell, and his business partner, Dick Aldrich, had put in a low bid when Portillo was auctioned off by the Chilean government. It turned out to be the only bid.”
They hired Purcell, a recent graduate of the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, to run South America’s oldest ski resort. In the near half-century since then, Purcell has built it into a legendary destination. He bought out his uncle and partner years ago, but he seems more like a flinty gentleman farmer from upstate New York than a typical CEO. A taciturn Yankee capable of fixing machinery in the morning and speaking knowledgeably about the merits of Chilean wine that evening, Purcell regularly charms his guests—a cast of international characters that might include an Argentinean doctor, the former Chilean Ambassador to the United Nations, supermodel Bridget Hall or the hundreds of Brazilian, Argentinean, Peruvian and American families who have visited Portillo dozens of times.
Purcell’s son from a previous marriage, Miguel, 46, was raised in the hotel and is now its general manager. Which is why the older employees, who measure their tenure in decades, refer to him as “Miguelito”: They’ve known him since
