Fresh snow puffed under my heels like icing sugar, and pine trees glistened like Christmas baubles under skies the colour of faded denim. Apart from the twin-toed tracks of roe deer and the cross-hatched marks left by bird’s feet, the snow swept ahead of me in a pristine swathe. The joy of being the first to plant skis on this powder-soft terrain was akin to the thrill of discovering a new country – it occurred to me that for most tourists who come here for blue skies and golden-sand beaches, Greece in winter is a new country.
I arrived in the mountain town of Arachova on the ski bus from Athens. I was the only foreigner making the two-hour journey. “You Brits hate the bad weather, but we have sunshine all the time – we love rain and snow,” a fellow traveller joked.
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“It’s a little-known fact that 80 per cent of Greece is made up of mountains and Olympos, our highest mountain, is nearly 3,000 metres high,” mountain guide Eleni Prablanc, who met me from the bus after the two-hour journey, told me. After a tour of Arachova’s amphitheatre, of cobbled alleys lined with slate-roofed houses gazing out over a smoke-wreathed valley, we headed for the slopes.
There are more than a dozen ski resorts in Greece. With 25 pistes suitable for all ability levels, the Parnassos Ski Centre near Arachova is one of the best. We swung by Kelaria, the jet-setter side of the mountain where crowds of Athenians in expensive winter wear lounged on sunbeds sipping cocktails, and then headed for the quieter slopes of Fterolaka. “We have lower slopes than the Alps, which means that there’s less chance of an avalanche,” Prablanc told me as we set off.
Since it was a weekday day, passes were only €11 (£9) and the slopes were sparsely populated “Most Greeks come here on the weekend,” Eleni said as she dug me out of – yet another – snowdrift.
Tired and hungry after sunset, I wandered Arachova’s cobbled streets lined with rustic tavernas, whose caned chairs and wonky blue tables spilled out onto the snow-covered pavement. At Kaplani’s, near the town’s…
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