Aviemore Cairngorms
Aviemore is the main gateway town for the Cairngorms National Park, the largest national park in the British Isles, and has been developed since the 1960s as a year-round outdoor recreation destination serving the ski fields, walking country, mountain biking trails, wildlife watching and watersports that the surrounding landscape offers in exceptional abundance. The town itself is a functional resort rather than a historic settlement, its modern hotel and leisure infrastructure reflecting its purpose-built character, but the landscape it serves is of the most remarkable quality.
The Cairngorm plateau, the high arctic mountain environment that forms the core of the national park, covers an area of over five hundred square kilometres above five hundred metres and contains five of the six highest mountains in Britain. The plateau's character is genuinely subalpine: harsh, exposed, subject to violent weather at any season and supporting plant and animal communities more typical of Scandinavia than of most of the British Isles. Dotterel, ptarmigan, snow bunting and the Scottish subspecies of the crossbill breed here in summer, while reindeer, introduced to the Cairngorms in 1952, roam the open mountain slopes in a herd that is the only free-ranging population in Britain.
The Cairngorm Mountain funicular railway, one of the highest mountain railways in Britain, carries visitors from the Coire Cas ski area to a visitor centre near the plateau summit, providing year-round access to the high mountain environment for those who prefer not to walk. The ski area is Scotland's largest and operates from approximately December to April in most years, though snow reliability has reduced in recent decades with changing climate patterns. In summer the ski area transforms into a mountain biking and walking venue of considerable scope.
The River Spey, one of Scotland's great salmon rivers, flows north from the national park through Aviemore, and the surrounding forests of ancient Caledonian pine, remnants of the great forest that once covered much of the Scottish Highlands, support capercaillie, red squirrel, crested tit and osprey in habitats of international conservation importance.