Sierra Nevada snow report
High, sunny and genuinely volatile: two consecutive recent seasons delivered 365 and 825 litres per square metre. Wind is the operational story, with 16 full closure days in 2025-26, eleven of them in February. Superb when the Atlantic delivers, heavily machine-dependent when it does not.
Spain · Europe · live from the weather model at 2100–3300 m
Conditions right now
Read at summit elevation the moment you opened this page.
Hourly windows, accumulation ranges, confidence and travel flags, or the transparent 0–100 Ski Meter score.
Weather data by Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0), adapted for display. Elevations are approximate published figures; forecasts are model estimates, not guarantees.
The mountain right now
The live freezing level drawn on the elevation profile. Above the snow line, precipitation falls and stays as snow.
Terrain shape is schematic; elevations are the resort's approximate published figures.
Why it snows here
Europe's southernmost major resort buys back its latitude with altitude: Atlantic troughs west of Iberia drive humid air into the Gulf of Cádiz, and only height keeps it frozen. A 70-year study of the range finds a consistent seasonal snowpack only above 2,300 m, which is 200 m higher than the base village.
Reading Sierra Nevada like a forecaster
The number that matters most at Sierra Nevada is the difference between the base (2100 m) and the summit (3300 m): when the freezing level sits between the two, the mountain is split into rain or wet snow below and dry snow above. The Ski Meter reads the model at both elevations and scores the day with every point accounted for; the full report adds hourly timing, accumulation ranges and confidence tags so you can decide when to travel, not just whether.