Isla Victoria

Isla Victoria in Nahuel Huapi Lake in Neuquén Province contains 130 tree species from five continents — Monterey pine from California, Douglas fir from Oregon, Sitka spruce from Alaska, European beech, and native arrayán all growing in the same forest — the product of a forestry experiment conducted by Argentina's National Park Administration between 1928 and 1978 that introduced species from around the world to test their adaptation to the Patagonian climate. Many of them adapted, and the result is a walking forest that exists nowhere else on Earth.

Isla Victoria is the largest island in Lago Nahuel Huapi, covering 3,500 hectares in the Nahuel Huapi National Park of Neuquén Province, accessible by boat from Puerto Pañuelo near Bariloche. The island's tree introduction programme, conducted by the Direction of National Parks from the late 1920s, was part of an early-twentieth-century Argentine effort to establish a commercial forestry industry in Patagonia — the project was eventually abandoned as economically unviable, but the introduced species established self-sustaining populations that have created the island's current mixed forest. The native arrayán forest on the island's northern tip — a stand of Luma apiculata with twisted orange trunks — is among the most photographed features in Patagonia and is protected as a special botanical zone. The island also contains a former deer breeding station (abandoned) and the ruins of the 1940s luxury hotel that served the early Bariloche tourism circuit.