Two hundred and seventy-three ski lifts completely abandoned. One hundred and six temporarily closed. Ninety-eight that open only now and then, depending on natural snow or on ever shakier finances. These are the figures in Nevediversa 2026, the report by Legambiente, the Italian environmental association. It is the most up-to-date and unsparing picture of the crisis reshaping the Italian mountains.
The decline is quiet but relentless. Climate change has sped it up, and decades of short-sighted policy have made it worse. It leaves behind rusting chairlifts, empty mountain huts and whole communities looking for another future.
Since 2020, the number of abandoned lifts has grown by 141. Another eight were added in the last year alone, between 2025 and 2026. The trend shows no sign of slowing, and it forces Italy to face a reality it ignored for a long time: the mass winter tourism model built in the second half of the 20th century is in structural crisis.
The Nevediversa 2026 report in figures
Legambiente publishes Nevediversa every year together with the Italian Alpine Club (CAI) and the Federazione Nazionale Pro Natura. It is the most detailed monitoring available of Italy’s cable cars and lifts and ski resorts. This year’s figures are clear:
| Category | Number of lifts |
|---|---|
| Completely abandoned | 273 |
| Temporarily closed | 106 |
| Open only intermittently | 98 |
| Kept alive only by public subsidies | 231 |
There is also a figure that rarely makes the headlines: the ‘suspended buildings’, tourist buildings linked to the snow industry that are abandoned or badly underused. In 2026 there are 247 of them: closed hotels, empty chalets, idle lifts and the service buildings around them. No policy has yet dealt with this built legacy as a whole, and it weighs on the mountain landscape.
Finally, the Alpine ski season has shrunk dramatically. Compared with fifty years ago, Italian ski areas lose on average 22 to 34 days of the season. Less snow, higher temperatures and ever shorter operating windows: climate change is no longer a forecast. It is already daily reality for anyone running a chairlift in the Apennines or at low and mid altitudes in the Alps.
The worst-hit regions
Piedmont: the most abandoned lifts in Italy
With 76 completely abandoned ski lifts, Piedmont is the region hardest hit by the crisis in winter tourism. The record reflects the history of skiing in the Piedmontese Alps: dozens of small and medium resorts, often with a single lift, built between the 1960s and the 1980s for local holidaymakers at low altitude. Already financially fragile, they were the first to give way to rising energy costs, falling snowfall and competition from the big international resorts.
In Piedmont the closures go beyond the lifts. Whole mountain villages have lost their hotels and guesthouses within a few years. The crisis is widespread, but it is sharpest in the valleys around Cuneo, in the Ossola and in the Valli di Lanzo, where the average altitude of the slopes was already at the limit of what the climate allows.
Lombardy: 51 lifts out of service
With 51 abandoned lifts, Lombardy comes second, but the picture here is different. The crisis here is more selective. The big resorts of upper Valtellina and the Brescia area are holding up, helped by major investment and higher altitudes. The ones suffering are the smaller areas in the Lombard Pre-Alps: the little resorts around Lecco and Bergamo and in the pre-Alpine valleys, where snow cover has become unreliable.
Lombardy is also one of the regions where the debate on reusing abandoned lifts is liveliest. Some local councils are trying conversions to summer tourism and outdoor activities, with results that are still partial but encouraging.
The other regions
Trentino-Alto Adige and the Aosta Valley, traditionally the strongholds of Italian skiing, have fewer closures, though not a negligible number. In Veneto, Liguria and above all the Apennine regions (Tuscany, Emilia-Romagna, Calabria), the historic ski resorts have almost entirely disappeared, many of them already weakened by years of poor natural snow.
The causes: climate, costs and no strategy
There is no single cause behind the crisis. It is the result of three pressures that have piled up and reinforced each other over time.
Climate change
The most visible cause is also the hardest to fight. The Alpine season is 22 to 34 days shorter than fifty years ago, and the trend will not reverse any time soon. The winter freezing level has risen by around 400 metres on average in six decades. Resorts below 1,500-1,700 metres can no longer count on enough natural snow for a season that pays its way.
Snowmaking has patched the problem for years, but it does not solve it. It needs low enough temperatures to work, uses large amounts of water and energy, and has running costs many operators can no longer afford.
Soaring costs
The cost of running a ski area has risen steeply over the last decade. Energy for snow guns, chairlifts and heating the service buildings is often the biggest single expense, and the swings in the energy market of recent years have hit small and medium resorts hard. On top of that come maintenance costs, driven by ever stricter regulations, and insurance premiums that keep rising.
No strategic vision
The third cause is political. For decades, Italian institutions at national, regional and local level answered the crisis with scattered subsidies, one-off grants and emergency measures. They never tackled the structural question: which ski areas have a real economic future, and which should be helped towards an orderly conversion?
Nevediversa 2026 points out that 231 lifts survive only thanks to public money. That raises urgent questions about whether this approach works and whether it can last. Money that could fund the conversion of mountain areas is instead spent keeping alive facilities that the market and the climate have already written off.
The problem of suspended buildings
One of the most overlooked sides of the crisis is what the report calls ‘suspended buildings’: 247 tourist buildings that are abandoned or chronically underused across the Italian mountains. Hotels built in the 1970s and never renovated, empty apartment blocks, idle lifts with the cabins still hanging on the cables, chalets and huts closed for years.
These buildings are a problem in several ways:
- Landscape: they scar places of great beauty and give an image of neglect that puts visitors off, even in areas that are still thriving.
- Ground stability: many are a hazard, with failing foundations, collapsing roofs and leaking snowmaking reservoirs.
- Money: making them safe falls to local communities, often with no funds and nobody willing to invest in restoring them.
The issue is not new, but it is reaching a critical point. Some regions have started surveys and funded demolition programmes, but the process is slow and the money is not enough. Meanwhile, the number of abandoned buildings keeps growing.
The resorts that hold out: what works
It is not all crisis. Part of the Italian lift system is not only holding out but growing. What sets the successful ski areas apart from the ones that close?
Altitude
The simplest factor is also the decisive one. High-altitude ski areas, above 1,800-2,000 metres, still enjoy a winter season long enough to make money. The Dolomites, upper Valtellina, Cervinia and Livigno have a climate safety margin that low-altitude resorts cannot have.
Summer diversification
The most far-sighted resorts have invested heavily in year-round tourism: mountain biking, hiking, trail running, via ferratas and summer holidays for families. The chairlift becomes a way into the mountains in every season, not just in winter. Where this shift has been made seriously, with investment in infrastructure, staff training and marketing, the finances are solid and local communities depend less on the snow.
Scale and connections
Large linked ski areas enjoy economies of scale that small isolated lifts cannot reach. Offering many kilometres of slopes, modern lifts and a full range of services draws international and family visitors who are ready to spend. The move towards consolidation, with mergers between ski areas and shared investment in infrastructure, looks set to continue.
The future of the Italian mountains: diversify or disappear
Nevediversa 2026 is not an indictment of skiing, nor of the people who built these lifts in decades when the climate and the economics were completely different. It is an urgent call to stop putting off choices that can no longer be avoided.
For ski areas with no future as ski resorts (too low, too small or too expensive to run), the answer is conversion. Slow tourism, hiking, mountain farming, renewable energy and forestry are alternative models that can create jobs and keep people in the mountains. They need planned investment and support policies, which today are almost entirely missing.
For ski areas that can still hold on, the priority is diversification. In high-altitude areas, skiing will remain the core of the winter offer for decades to come, but it can no longer be a mountain destination’s only reason to exist. The resorts that survive will be those that have built an identity able to draw visitors in every season, for reasons that go beyond snow.
For the institutions, the message is blunt. Funding loss-making lifts across the board wastes public money and does mountain communities no favours. That money would be better spent on serious conversion plans, infrastructure for other kinds of tourism, restoring suspended buildings and supporting local businesses that want to reinvent themselves.
The Italian mountains are not doomed, but they are at a crossroads. They can keep pretending that the 20th-century model will survive with a few more subsidies, or face the change honestly and steer it instead of suffering it. The 273 abandoned lifts in Nevediversa 2026 measure how much time has already been lost. How much longer anyone can wait is an open question, and the deadline moves closer with every winter without snow.
To see the current state of the lifts running in Italy, our regional pages have up-to-date data on the cable cars, chairlifts and gondolas in operation, with timetables, altitudes and seasonal status.