Magura Ski Park

Magura Małastowska is a long, lofty, monotonous mountain ridge and one of the dominant features of the landscape in the western part of the Beskid Niski. It has long been a destination for hikers, and a mountain hut below the summit was built as early as the 1950s. Skiers took an interest in Magura in the 1980s, when a T-bar was built here, running almost to the summit. For most of its history the lift, together with the ski area in the centre of Małastów, belonged to the Gorlice sports and recreation centre (OSiR), but in 2008 it passed into the hands of a private investor, who decided to modernise the area completely. In 2010 a chairlift was built here: a fairly modern Tatrapoma design with a capacity of 2,200 people per hour (4-seater chairs). The lift is more than 1 km long (1,070 m) and has a vertical rise of more than 260 metres. The valley station is in the forest, a little above the village of Małastów, and the top station is on the Magura ridge, just below the summit; the piste is 1,400 metres long. The lower terminal has a convenient boarding conveyor. Unfortunately, the number of pistes was not increased at the same time: skiers have one red piste, widened only slightly in places (the average width over most of the piste is about 30 metres), which, given its winding course and the chairlift's fairly high capacity, is not very comfortable. Besides the red piste, which is floodlit, groomed and has snowmaking, there used to be an easy run down an old logging road, but this run, still marked on some maps, is no longer in use. At the valley station there is a snack bar, an equipment rental shop and a ski school, as well as a fairly large free car park. With good snow cover you can also ski down from below the summit to the PTTK mountain hut and on towards the Małastowska Pass (Przełęcz Małastowska), crossed by the road to Konieczna and Gorlice, where there is a beautiful wooden First World War cemetery. Near the summit a 2.5 km cross-country trail has been marked out. Several dozen kilometres of cross-country trails have also been marked out around Gładyszów, Radocyna, Wołowiec and Pętna, though the trails are not track-set. The villages have many historic sights, mainly small wooden tserkvas (Eastern-rite churches), and the valley of the Przysłop stream, parallel to the Magura ridge, has the largest concentration of old wooden Lemko farmhouses in the whole Beskid Niski.