MPORA

Travel To really know a place, you need to speak to someone who actually lives there, without relying just on guidebooks and Google searches. Snow Magazine speaks to two locals who give us the inside scoop on visiting the Ski Juwel Alpbachtal Wildschönau ski area. Sponsored content These days, it’s incredibly easy to find your way around any ski resort by yourself.

Travel The internet is all well and good, but if you really want to get to know a place, you need some insider knowledge. Snow Magazine talks to a local to get to know the beautiful ski resort of St. Johann in Salzburg on a different level. Sponsored content There’s a saying in travel: if you want to see the sights, pick up a guidebook; but if you want to discover what makes a place special, you have to ask a local. Our sister publication, Snow Magazine, thinks this is especially true for skiing.

Travel The mountains of Asturias are the last remaining refuge of the Cantabrian Brown Bear. Stuart Kenny goes in search of the elusive creatures. “We’re deep in the untouched part of Asturias here,” says Fernando Abarquero Zorilla, my guide. Specifically, we’re in the Fuentes del Narcea, Degaña e Ibias Natural Park, in northwestern Spain. We’re looking across a deep, narrow valley, to where a tangle of green beech, birch and oak trees rise steeply up from the Ibias River.

After a 15-year stint as a key platform for adventure sports and travel, Mpora.com will soon be discontinued, and redirected to our sister title Active Traveller Magazine. With a history going back nearly 20 years, Active Traveller is an annual print magazine. Its superb, informative website will be the perfect home for the legacy content from Mpora.com. This move allows us to house all our adventure and travel content under one umbrella.

Rock Climbing, Abseiling & Canyoning From via ferrata in the Dolomites to via ferrata on the Spanish coast, when it comes to the "iron way" Europe has so many good routes to choose from Europe, or more specifically, Italy, is the homeland of the via ferrata. The idea of bolting steel ladders and safety cables to the rock was developed in the Dolomites during the First World War.

Travel Surrounded by the highest mountains in Europe, the Aosta Valley boasts spectacular scenery, world-class hiking and biking, superb food, and a history stretching back to Roman times. Take a look at our guide and discover some of the best summer holidays in Italy. Well known and loved by skiers who flock to the region’s five ski areas every winter, an Aosta Valley summer holiday provides alternative ways to explore the Italian alps.

Travel Once described by the writer Bill Finnegan as “the Hawaii of Europe,” Madeira has dropped off surfers’ maps in recent years. Matt Carr goes in search of its secrets. “Really?!” my mother-in-law asked, eyebrow raised, when I said we were going to Madeira.

Travel It’s among the best-known destinations in Spain, but seeing it from all angles gave Dan Wildey a whole new perspective on Costa Brava. East of the resort town of Roses on the Cap de Creus, a peninsula on Catalunya’s Costa Brava, the tarmac runs out. If you carry on down the dirt track for another six kilometres, however, you end up in a little slice of paradise.

Travel Add Zadar to your bucket list - Croatia’s hidden city is the perfect springboard for adventures on land and sea. It’s the eternal question for active types – would you rather go exploring in the mountains or by the sea? The locals of Zadar on Croatia’s Dalmatian coast needn’t bother answering – this vibrant and welcoming city has the best of both on its doorstep.

A small BMX store just outside of London is not necessarily the kind of place you’d expect to meet Mat Hoffman. But the figure hobbling his way, on crutches, over from the Hoffman Bikes van to the makeshift throne that’s been set out for him in the shop is unmistakably the man himself. He moves with a precision born from spending many hours on crutches. His entrance says a lot about his career; you don’t become king without fighting a few battles first.