Stations de ski en Slovenia

Slovenian skiing is small scale, friendly and remarkably easy to reach, with Ljubljana airport under an hour from several areas. Kranjska Gora, tucked under the Julian Alps at the Austrian and Italian border, is the best known: modest in size but with a World Cup slalom hill and the Planica jumping valley next door. Mariborsko Pohorje, above Maribor in the east, has the longest floodlit night skiing run in Europe and a gondola straight from the city.

Vogel, above Lake Bohinj, is the scenic one, with a cable car from the lake shore and views straight into the Triglav massif, and Krvavec sits closest to Ljubljana with the highest terrain in the country. Vertical drops and piste counts are small by Alpine standards, so Slovenia suits short breaks, families and skiers happy to combine a few days on snow with something else.

That something else is the country's strength. The thermal spas across the north east, sledging runs at Krvavec and Vogel, cross country trails at Pokljuka, which hosts biathlon World Cups, and winter walking around Lake Bled and Lake Bohinj all sit within an easy drive. Ski touring in the Julian Alps is serious and growing, the Soča valley is an hour away, and Ljubljana itself is one of the more agreeable small capitals in Europe for an evening.

Slovenian food sits at the meeting point of Alpine, Balkan and Italian traditions and is much better than most visitors expect. Jota, a thick soup of sauerkraut, beans and potato, and ričet, barley and bean stew with smoked pork, are the mountain warmers. Kranjska klobasa, the Carniolan sausage protected by EU origin rules, is boiled and served with mustard and horseradish and is as national a dish as the country has.

Štruklji, rolled dumplings filled with cottage cheese, walnuts or tarragon, come both savoury and sweet and are the thing to order that you will not find elsewhere. Idrijski žlikrofi, small potato filled dumplings from Idrija, are similarly protected and similarly local. The dessert is potica, a rolled yeast cake with walnut, honey or poppy seed filling, or gibanica in the east with its layers of poppy seed, walnut, apple and cottage cheese. On the coast side of the country, Italian influence brings gnocchi and prosciutto style pršut.

Slovenian wine deserves more attention than it gets: Rebula and Malvazija from the Goriška Brda and Vipava, Teran from the Karst, and the orange skin contact wines that put the country on the natural wine map. Beer is Union or Laško, and the spirit is a fruit brandy called žganje or, medicinally, the honey brandy medica. Après ski is low key: a mountain hut, a bowl of jota and a glass of cviček rather than a nightclub.

Planica, in the valley beyond Kranjska Gora, is the world capital of ski flying. The first jump over 100 m was made there in 1936 and the first over 200 m in 1994, and the Letalnica bratov Gorišek hill still holds the sport's distance records regularly. The season closing ski flying World Cup weekend at Planica draws tens of thousands and is essentially a national holiday.

Kranjska Gora's Podkoren slope has hosted the Vitranc Cup World Cup giant slalom and slalom since the 1960s, and Maribor hosts the Golden Fox women's races on the Pohorje. Pokljuka is a fixture of the biathlon World Cup calendar. Slovenia's medal record in alpine skiing, from Bojan Križaj through Tina Maze's two Olympic golds at Sochi in 2014 and her record breaking 2012/13 World Cup season, is exceptional for a country of two million.

The Bloke plateau in southern Slovenia has one of the older documented skiing traditions in central Europe: seventeenth century accounts by the polymath Janez Vajkard Valvasor describe local peasants moving across the snow on wooden boards, and the Bloke ski is often cited as an independently developed European ski tradition distinct from the Nordic one. Whether it directly influenced later Alpine skiing is debated, but the historical record itself is solid.