Bariloche

Nahuel Huapi Lake stretches 100 kilometres through a landscape of glacial valleys and lenga beech forest, its colour shifting from turquoise in the shallows to deep cobalt where the depth drops below 400 metres. San Carlos de Bariloche in Río Negro Province sits on its southern shore, a town whose Swiss and German immigrant architecture has been so thoroughly absorbed into the Argentine character that chocolate shops and craft beer breweries coexist with parrillas and mate without any sense of contradiction. The lake in the afternoon light, with the Andes rising behind it, is an image Argentina uses to sell itself to the world — and the reality exceeds it.

Nahuel Huapi National Park, established in 1934 as Argentina's first protected area, covers 7,100 square kilometres of Patagonian lakes, rivers, and peaks, with Bariloche as its main gateway. The park's temperate rainforest — a relict community of arrayán, alerce, and coihue that shares genetic lineage with trees in New Zealand and Tasmania — is a reminder that Patagonia was once connected to the ancient supercontinent of Gondwana. The Circuito Chico, a 65-kilometre road loop around the peninsula, passes archaeological sites, a chocolate factory operating in a 1940s lakeside chalet, and viewpoints over the Llao Llao peninsula that have appeared on Argentine banknotes. In winter the Cerro Catedral ski resort, 20 kilometres from town, operates as the largest ski centre in the southern hemisphere.