ArchiveSunKid Leads the Way with Project in the Pyrenees
One tends to associate Spain with summer, sun, palm trees and seaside holidays. Indeed, it is a little known fact that the Pyrenees contain around 200 mountains measuring 3,000 metres and above. The mountain range on the border between France and Spain is also home to some top-class ski resorts such as Baqueira-Beret, Spain’s largest ski area.
The 33 lifts in the region serve a 110 kilometres of pisted slopes.
Seven of these lifts are SunKid Wonder Carpets and their installation has allowed the resort to develop a complete logistical solution around the middle lift station, incorporating shops, a restaurant, a children’s and beginners’ ski area as well as other services and attractions.
A new fully-covered SunKid Wonder Carpet transports guests from the top station of the newly-installed 8-man gondola to the nearby mountain restaurant and back. Measuring a total of 93 metres in length, the conveyor is capable of transporting guests in both directions and is fitted with a 75 cm-wide “Ruff Top“running surface featuring the SunKid endless conveyor technology.
The facility is controlled and supervised directly from the top station of the gondola lift, thus allowing all guests to the region including pedestrians, skiers and snowboarders to be transported swiftly and safely to the restaurant and back.
This conveyor has established itself as the busiest lift in the whole area, clocking up and incredible 135,000 guests transported by the end of February. Based on these numbers for the first few months of the winter season, the resort management estimates that a total of around 220,000 guests will have used the facility by the end of the conveyor’s first winter in service! These figures indicate that the Wonder Carpet is running at 43% of its maximum possible capacity, making it the most capacity-efficient lift in the whole of the region.
- Die SunKid Galerie. Eine wahre Augenweide
A further SunKid conveyor transports guests from the mountain restaurant to the children’s and beginners’ ski area. The conveyor has a running length of 93 metres and is also equipped with a full-length SunKid cover. The facility is fitted with a chain technology running surface and powered by an 11 kW drive motor.
The beginners’ ski area contains a further four Wonder Carpets, including a 105 metre long chain technology conveyor driven by a 15kW motor which gives guests access to the whole of the area.
The other conveyors in the area measure 39, 27 and 39 metres respectively. The first of these conveyors is equipped with chain technology while the remaining two newly-installed Wonder Carpets have been fitted with a Blue Eye running surface.
All of these conveyors boast a maximum theoretical transport capacity of 1,440 skiers or 2,000 pedestrians per hour. That means that, when totalled together, the seven conveyors installed in the region have a maximum theoretical transport capacity of an incredible 10,080 skiers or 14,000 pedestrians per hour!
This project represents the largest and most ambitious of its kind in the ten-year history of SunKid. Just five months were required for the project planning and development, the major landscaping work required on the slopes as well as the delivery and installation of the conveyors. The latter aspect was particularly challenging since all seven installations had to be installed within a time window of just five weeks. It is was only thanks to a perfectly coordinated cooperation between the client, SunKid’s Spanish partner company I+C and SunKid Austria that this pioneering project was able to be realised.