Parque Nacional Baritú

Baritú is Argentina's least accessible national park: 72,000 hectares of yungas cloud forest on the Bolivian border, unreachable by paved road from the Argentine side, its trails asking waded river crossings of everyone who comes. Jaguars move through it regularly — camera traps have documented them for years — and the inaccessibility has preserved one of the country's densest remaining jaguar populations.

Established in 1974 at the northern extreme of Argentina's Yungas, the park runs from about 600 to 1,800 metres of steep, dense cloud forest sharing species with Bolivia — tapir, peccary, ocelot under active researcher monitoring, and even the spectacled bear recorded at this frontier edge of its range. The practical way in is the road that loops through Bolivian territory to Los Toldos; from the Argentine side it is days of jungle trail and river fords. Visitors register with the park rangers before entering, signal dies well before the boundary, and annual visits are measured in dozens — depth here comes through preparation and ranger-supported routes, never a promise of easy wilderness. Tree ferns and bamboo groves make the forest entirely tropical in feel: the southernmost cloud forest of its kind on Earth.