11 Best Sights in Patagonia, Argentina

From the middle of September through mid-April, almost 400,000 penguins live in the Area Natural Protegido Punta Tombo, the world's second-largest colony of Magellanic penguins and one of the most varied seabird rookeries. From the park entrance, a series of trails, boardwalks, and bridges lead you 3½ km (2 miles) through the scrubby landscape where the penguins nest to the sea. The quizzical creatures seem unafraid of humans, and peer up at you from under the bushes where, between September and November, both males and females incubate eggs, often right beside the trail. Look for the bald vertical strips on the penguins' abdomens: they pluck out feathers so the eggs can sit warm against their skin. Come December, the ground is teeming with fluffy gray young, and the adult penguins waddle back and forth from the sea to feed them. They may move comically on land, but once you reach the rocky outcrops overlooking the water you'll see how graceful and powerful these creatures become when they enter the water. You may also spot guanacos, seals, and Patagonian hares in the reserve, as well as cormorants and a host of other seabirds.

The last 22 km (14 miles) of the road from Trelew is fairly bumpy gravel. If you're not driving, you can easily reach Punta Tombo on a day tour from Trelew, Gaiman, or Puerto Madryn, although note that these often give you a scant 1½ hours in the reserve. A small restaurant next to the carpark serves good lamb empanadas and also has burgers, coffee, cakes, and cold beverages.

Several tour operators run trips along the Canal Beagle, on which you can get a startling close-up view of sea mammals and birds on Isla de los Lobos, Isla de los Pájaros, and near Les Eclaireurs Lighthouse. Catamarans, motorboats, and sailboats usually leave from the tourist pier at 9:30, 10, 3, and 3:30 (trips depend on weather; few trips go in winter). Some trips include hikes on the islands. Check with the tourist office for the latest details; you can also book through any of the local travel agencies or scope out the offers yourself by walking around the kiosks on the tourist pier.

Following the coastal road 14 km (9 miles) north from Puerto Madryn brings you to this whale-watching spot. The ocean floor drops away steeply from the beach, so between June and mid-December you can stand on the sand with a close up view of the southern right whales right from the shore, usually mothers teaching their young to swim. During the rest of the year, it's just a regular beach. It's a pleasant 1½ hours' bike ride from Puerto Madryn. Alternatively, taxis charge about 2,500 pesos for the round-trip including a 45-minute stay. Grab some food to go and make it a picnic spot. 

At the peninsula’s northern tip is the world's largest Magellanic penguin colony at and around Estancia San Lorenzo, numbering some 600,000 penguins. San Lorenzo offers three guided tours (1 hour and 15 minutes) to the penguin colony every afternoon, always with a ranger. Also on site are a restaurant and visitors can tour a sheep ranch and the ruins of a former factory that once processed sea lion blubber and skin. 

It might pale in comparison to the glaciers in El Calafate, but a visit to the shrinking Glaciar Martial in the mountain range just above Ushuaia offers a nice walk. Named after Frenchman Luís F. Martial, a 19th-century scientist who wandered this way aboard the warship Romanche to observe the passing of the planet Venus, the glacier is reached via a panoramic aerosilla (ski lift) or by foot. Take the Camino al Glaciar (Glacier Road) 7 km (4.5 miles) out of town until it ends (this route is also served by the local tour companies). Stop off at one of the teahouses en route (at the foot of the ski lift, when it is functioning) because this is a steep, strenuous 90-minute hike to the top. You can cool your heels in one of the many gurgling, icy rivulets that cascade down water-worn shale shoots or enjoy a picnic while you wait for sunset (you can walk all the way down if you want to linger until after the aerosilla closes). When the sun drops behind the glacier's jagged crown of peaks, brilliant rays beam over the mountain's crest, spilling a halo of gold-flecked light on the glacier, valley, and channel below. Moments like these are why this land is so magical. Note that temperatures drop dramatically after sunset, so come prepared with warm clothing.

Eighty km (50 miles) away on R11, the road to the Glaciar Perito Moreno has now been entirely paved. From the park entrance the road winds through hills and forests of lenga and ñire trees, until all at once the glacier comes into full view. Descending like a long white tongue through distant mountains, it ends abruptly in a translucent azure wall 5 km (3 miles) wide and 240 feet high at the edge of frosty green Lago Argentino.

Although it's possible to rent a car and go on your own (which can give you the advantage of avoiding large tourist groups), virtually everyone visits the park on a day trip booked through one of the many travel agents in El Calafate. The most basic tours start at 4,000 pesos for the round-trip (excluding entrance) and take you to see the glacier from a viewing area composed of a series of platforms wrapped around the point of the Península de Magallanes. The platforms, which offer perhaps the most impressive view of the glacier, allow you to wander back and forth, looking across the Canal de los Tempanos (Iceberg Channel). Here you listen and wait for nature's number-one ice show—first, a cracking sound, followed by tons of ice breaking away and falling with a thunderous crash into the lake. As the glacier creeps across this narrow channel and meets the land on the other side, an ice dam sometimes builds up between the inlet of Brazo Rico on the left and the rest of the lake on the right. As the pressure on the dam increases, everyone waits for the day it will rupture again.

In recent years the surge in the number of visitors to Glaciar Perito Moreno has created a crowded scene that is not always conducive to reflective encounters with nature's majesty. Although the glacier remains spectacular, savvy travelers would do well to minimize time at the madhouse that the viewing area becomes at midday in high season, and instead encounter the glacier by boat or on a mini-trekking excursion. Better yet, rent a car and get an early start to beat the tour buses, or visit Perito Moreno in the off-season when a spectacular rupture is just as likely as in midsummer, and you won't have to crane over other people's heads to see it.

Some 4 km (3 miles) from Puerto Pirámides lies the Lobería Puerto Pirámides, a year-round sea-lion colony that is also a great bird-watching spot. A signposted turnoff from the main road into town leads here, or you can follow the coastal path on foot.

Part of the original penal colony, the Presidio building was built to hold political prisoners, murderous estancia owners, street orphans, and a variety of Buenos Aires' most violent criminals. Some even claim that singer Carlos Gardel landed in one of the cells for the petty crimes of his misspent youth. In its day it held 600 inmates in 380 cells. Today it's on the grounds of Ushuaia's naval base and holds the Museo Marítimo, which starts with exhibits on the canoe-making skills of the region's indigenous peoples, tracks the navigational history of Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn and the Antarctic, and even has a display on other great jails of the world. You can enter cell blocks and read about the grisly crimes of the prisoners who lived in them and measure yourself against their eerie life-size plaster effigies. Of the five wings spreading out from the main guard house, one has been transformed into an art gallery and another has been kept untouched—and unheated. Bone-chattering cold and bleak, bare walls powerfully evoke the desolation of a long sentence at the tip of the continent. Well-presented tours (in Spanish only) are conducted at 11:30 am, 4:30 pm, and 6:30 pm daily.

Trelew's star attraction is the paleontology museum, where four hushed and darkened galleries of fossils both real and replica take you back in time. You start among the South American megafauna (giant armadillos and the like) that may have cohabited with the first humans here, then plunge back to a time before the Andes existed. Back then Patagonia was a subtropical rain forest filled with dinosaurs, including one of the largest creatures ever to walk the earth: the 70-ton, 120-foot-long Argentinosaurus. Replicas of its massive leg bones are on display, along with countless other dino skeletons, including the latest discovery of the largest dinosaur in the world—a 130-foot-long herbivore. Other highlights include a 290-million-year-old spider fossil with a 3-foot leg span and the 70-million-year-old petrified eggs of a Carnotaurus. The visit ends with a peek into the workshop where paleontologists study and preserve newly unearthed fossils. Tours in English are available—they're a good idea, as only the introductions to each room are translated.

As the name suggests, this national park is renowned for being the home of 47 glaciers, with almost a third of the entire park covered in ice. A giant ice cap located in the Andes Mountains, the world’s largest outside of Antarctica and Greenland, feeds all 47 of the glaciers, which snake through the Patagonian steppe and sub-polar forests, eventually crumbling into milky blue glacial lakes. A UNESCO World Heritage site, it is also the largest national park in Argentina and spans over 2,500 square miles, encompassing the territories running from El Chaltén down to El Calafate, on the border of Chile’s Torres del Paine. Spotting the glaciers is the highlight of any visit to the park, with the most accessible one being Perito Moreno, which can be reached by road. Visiting the Upsala and Spegazzini glaciers requires a boat journey, and the Viedma Glacier can be seen from hiking paths on the shore of Lake Viedma, a route that is particularly popular with trekkers and climbers who journey onward to Mount Fitzroy and Cerro Torre (which are also within the park limits). Lago del Desert and Lago Roca are the other two most visited sites in the park, but outside of these locations the majority of the park is left wonderfully unexplored and untouched. There are few places to stay in the park with the exception of a few estancias and campsites at Lago Roca and on the hiking routes of El Chaltén. Beyond the stunning landscapes, the park is the natural habitat of guanacos, ñandúes, cougars, and the South American gray fox, as well as more than 100 different species of birds. The park is open all year-round, although winter frequently sees snowfall as the temperature drops below freezing.

The pristine park offers a chance to wander through peat bogs, stumble upon hidden lakes, trek through native canelo, lenga, and wild cherry forests, and experience the wonders of wind-whipped Tierra del Fuego's rich flora and fauna. Everywhere, lichens line the trunks of the ubiquitous lenga trees, and "Chinese lantern" parasites hang from the branches.

Another thing you'll see everywhere are the results of government folly, in the form of castoreros (beaver dams) and lodges. Fifty beaver couples were first brought here from Canada in 1948 so that they would breed and create a fur industry. In the years since, without any predators, the beaver population has exploded to plague proportions (more than 100,000) and now represents a major threat to the forests, as the dams flood the roots of the trees; you can see their effects on parched dead trees on the lake's edge. Believe it or not, the government used to pay hunters a bounty for each beaver they killed (they had to show a tail and head as proof). To make matters worse, the government, after creating the beaver problem, introduced weasels to kill the beavers, but the weasels killed birds instead; they then introduced foxes to kill the beavers and weasels, but they also killed the birds. With eradication efforts failing, some tour operators have accepted them as a permanent presence and now offer beaver-viewing trips.

Visits to the park, which is tucked up against the Chilean border, are commonly arranged through tour companies. Trips range from bus tours to horseback riding to more adventurous excursions, such as canoe trips across Lapataia Bay. Entrance to the park is 2,100 pesos.

Several private bus companies travel through the park making numerous stops; you can get off the bus, explore the park, and then wait for the next bus to come by or trek to the next stop (the service operates only in summer; check providers with the tourism office). Another option is to drive to the park on R3 (take it until it ends and you see the famous sign indicating the end of the Pan-American Highway, which starts 17,848 km [11,065 miles] away in Alaska, and ends here). If you don't have a car, you can hire a private remís (taxi) to spend a few hours driving through the park, including the Pan-American terminus, and perhaps combining the excursion with the Tren del Fin del Mundo. Trail and camping information is available at the park-entrance ranger station or at the Ushuaia tourist office. At the park entrance is a gleaming restaurant and teahouse set amid the hills, Patagonia Mia ( www.patagoniamia.com); it's a great place to stop for tea or coffee, or a full meal of roast lamb or Fuegian seafood. A nice excursion in the park is by boat from lovely Bahía Ensenada to Isla Redonda, a wildlife refuge where you can follow a footpath to the western side and see a wonderful view of the Canal Beagle. This is included on some of the day tours; it's harder to arrange on your own, but you can contact the tourist office to try. While on Isla Redonda you can send a postcard and get your passport stamped at the world's southernmost post office. You can also see the Ensenada bay and island (from afar) from a point on the shore that is reachable by car.

Other highlights of the park include the spectacular mountain-ringed lake, Lago Roca, as well as Laguna Verde, a lagoon whose green color comes from algae at its bottom. Much of the park is closed from roughly June through September, when the descent to Bahía Ensenada is blocked by up to 6 feet of snow. Even in May and October, chains for your car are a good idea. No hotels are within the park—the only one burned down in the 1980s, and you can see its carcass as you drive by—but there are three simple camping areas around Lago Roca.