ARINSAL  (VALLNORD)

Resort Overview
A great choice for beginners and intermediates:
with a compact ski area, friendly tuition, cheap prices, Brit-orientated ambiance and rocking nightlife.

Introduction
Located in the mid- to north-west of Andorra, in the parish of La Massana, the village of Arinsal is the only true resort in this region of Andorra. It’s dominated by, and practically designed around, English-speaking visitors; a legacy of its long-established promotion by UK/Irish tour operators as their lead-in price destination for ‘beginners-on-a-budget’, and it still consistently delivers to many satisfied guests fitting this profile. It also attracts a wider international clientele too: Spanish, French, Dutch, Belgian and even some Israeli and Russian visitors.

Vallnord
The local ski area comprises two lift-linked ski stations (Pal and Arinsal) that were originally separate entities; Andorra’s first full-size cable car has linked the two ski areas since the 2000/01 season, although there are still no linking pistes.
Direct access gondolas to the slopes are based in the village of Arinsal (for the Arinsal sector) and in the nearby parish capital of La Massana (for the Pal sector); it’s also possible to drive up to the main base-lodge areas served by the gondolas.

A third, separate, ski station called Arcalís, located some distance away in the neighbouring parish of Ordino, is also included on the same lift pass and the combined domain is now known as Vallnord.

Pal & La Massana
Pal takes its name from a hamlet of the same name tucked away in a picturesque quiet valley just south-west of Arinsal. The hamlet has no lift links with the ski area and seems content to remain as an authentic and historically noteworthy rural hideaway, untainted by mass tourism except for a couple of roadside equipment-rental shops and one decent quality restaurant housed in a renovated village barn.

La Massana, this region’s main town and parish capital, is situated at the confluence of the Valira del Nord and Arinsal rivers, well below the actual ski areas. In 2004, a gondola was installed to link La Massana with the ski area at Pal, effectively grafting the town on as a ready-made ‘resort’, although it remains a working community at heart without the ambiance of a true ski village. However, now that the gondola connects the town directly with the pistes, an increasingly resort-minded focus is rapidly evolving, resulting in new hotels and services developments and traffic-flow improvements in the town centre. La Massana now boasts the closest ski area to Andorra’s capital [just 6 km (3¾ miles) away down the valley], so it should, therefore, also increase its already strong appeal to the local/Spanish weekend tourist market too.