Cortina d'Ampezzo for non-skiers (and reluctant ones)

Potentially not everyone in your family wants to ski, so where is the best place for a winter mountain holiday for families with non-skiers?

Perhaps it's the partner who comes for the company but not the cold, the grandparent who hung up their skis years ago, the teenager staging a quiet protest against family activities, or simply the person who tried it once, fell over a lot, and decided life was too short, Cortina is the resort we would recommend to keep the whole group happy.

In most ski resorts non-skiers are an afterthought. They get a spa, a couple of cafés, and a long wait in a hotel lobby while everyone else has the actual holiday. Cortina is the exception. It is one of a tiny handful of places in the Alps that is genuinely, properly worth visiting whether or not you ever clip into a binding. Here is why, and how to do it well.

It's a town, as opposed to a ski station

This is the whole thing, really, so let's start here.

Most famous ski resorts were either purpose-built for skiing (Val Thorens, Avoriaz, half of the French Alps), or are small mountain villages that swell tenfold in winter and shrink back in summer. Cortina is neither of these. It's a proper Italian town of around six thousand people that happens to sit in the most beautiful mountains in Europe and happens to have great skiing on the doorstep.

What that means for a non-skier is transformative. You are not stranded in a resort that has nothing for you between nine and four. You are in a handsome, walkable, pedestrianised town with a genuine life of its own: a main street (the Corso Italia) lined with serious shops, a cluster of proper cafés where the morning espresso ritual is taken extremely seriously, a weekly market, a couple of museums, churches worth stepping into, and a passeggiata, the early-evening stroll, that the whole town turns out for. You can fill a day here without once heading up the mountains, and feel like you have been somewhere rather than waited somewhere.

By day three non-skiers will be enjoying a routine of pastries at Lovat, a wander down the Corso, a long lunch somewhere, an afternoon in the chalet's private pool or hot tub, and a glass of something on a sunny terrace as the rest of the group come down off the hill. Honestly, it's at this point that half the skiers in the group start to wonder if they shouldn't be taking some time away from the pistes themselves.

The shopping is a sport in itself

Cortina takes shopping seriously in a way that will either delight or bemuse.

The Corso Italia and the streets around it hold the big international names (you'll find the Italian luxury houses well represented), alongside the thing that actually makes Cortina shopping special: the independents. There are decades-old family jewellers, ski and mountain-sportswear shops that have outfitted Olympic teams, antique dealers, a proper bookshop, delicatessens stacked with the produce of the Veneto and the Dolomites. The window displays alone are worth the walk.

This is not bolt-on resort retail; Cortina has been the smart Italians' mountain town since the 1950s, when it first hosted the Winter Olympics (it's a co-host of the 2026 Winter Games, so it's currently having another 'moment'), and Hollywood discovered it. The shopping reflects this long-established, slightly old-money sensibility. For a non-skier with an afternoon and a credit card, it is a genuinely good day out. For a non-skier without a credit card, the window-shopping and people-watching are nearly as good...and free.

Lunch is the main event

If you take one piece of advice from this article, take this: in Cortina, lunch is not a refuelling stop, it is the centre of the day, and non-skiers get the best of it.

Here's the lovely thing. Some of the best mountain restaurants in Cortina are reachable by cable car and chairlift without any skiing involved at all. You can buy a single-ride pedestrian lift ticket, ride up to a rifugio at 2,000-odd metres, and have one of the great lunches of your life with the Dolomites arranged around you like a stage set, then ride back down.

Rifugio Averau, at the top of the Cinque Torri lift, is the one we send everyone to. The food is truly great - think handmade pasta, slow-cooked meats, and local casunziei dumplings, the south-facing terrace is a sun-trap, and the view of the Cinque Torri pinnacles is, well, awe-inspiring. A skiing family can meet their non-skiing members up there for lunch, which solves the "we never see each other all day" problem that ruins so many mixed-ability ski weeks. Everyone converges at altitude, eats far too much, and the skiers ski down while the non-skiers take the lift. It is, genuinely, one of the nicest ways to spend a mountain day we know.

Down in town, the dining is just as serious. SanBrite holds a Michelin star and is worth booking ahead. For something more relaxed, El Camineto and a cluster of trattorias in the centre of town showcase proper Italian cooking without fuss. A non-skier who likes to eat will not have a thin week in Cortina.

Make the most of your winter holiday

Beyond eating and shopping, Cortina has a legitimate roster of activities for non-skiing visitors.

The walking is the obvious one and actually one of our favourites. The valley floor and lower slopes have a network of cleared winter footpaths, and on a crisp blue day walking beneath the Dolomite walls is spectacular and entirely undemanding. The tourist office hands out a map; you don't need a guide for the easy routes. For something more structured, guided snowshoe walks get you into quieter terrain with someone who knows where the views are, and they're suitable for almost any reasonable fitness level.

The Olympic ice rink, the Stadio Olimpico, was built for the 1956 Games and has been skated on continuously ever since. It's open to the public most days and is a lovely, slightly nostalgic hour, with skate hire on site. Especially great for children, it makes for a lovely afternoon of laughter and learning something new.

Then there are the gentler curiosities. The horse-drawn sleigh rides. The cable car up to the Faloria for the unmissable view. Even a day trip to Venice is genuinely doable as a long day out (around two hours each way), and offers a glorious contrast: the Dolomites for breakfast, the lagoon for lunch. Alternatively, for a special occasion, a helicopter transfer between the two cuts journey times to about 45 minutes, and the mountain views are unforgettable.

And for the reluctant skier specifically, as opposed to the committed non-skier, Cortina offers a gentle on-ramp. The pistes are forgiving and the sun is warm. We have found Italian ski schools to be endlessly patient and good-humoured. An unsure skier who has been put off by a brutal first experience on a busy, icy French run during February half-term might find their feet here, where everything is sunnier and softer.

One potential catch

Honesty compels a caveat. Cortina is not the resort to choose if your group is split between people who want to ski hard all day and people who want none of it, and you all want to be in and out of the door together constantly. The ski areas are a little spread out, the town and the lifts aren't all on top of each other, and getting between things sometimes means a bus or a short drive. For the dedicated skiers, this is a minor friction. For a group wanting everyone glued together every minute, it asks for a bit of planning.

But for the more common situation, a family where the skiers go and do their thing and the non-skiers want a rich, genuine holiday of their own, with everyone reconvening for those long lunches and longer dinners, Cortina is about as good as it gets.

So, is it for you?

If you're the non-skier who suffers mountain holidays for the benefit of your children and family, Cortina is the resort to lobby for. Alternatively, if you're the skier trying to talk a reluctant partner or parent into coming, this is the place that makes the case for you. And if you're the reluctant skier who's never quite seen the appeal, the warm sun and gentle slopes of the Dolomites stand a good chance of changing.

Cortina is one of our favourite Italian picks for a family ski holiday, and the one we'd choose specifically when not everyone in the group is a skier. If you'd like help putting a week together that works for the whole family, skiers and refuseniks alike, tell us what you're after and we'll point you the right way.