Parque Nacional Patagonia

Parque Nacional Patagonia in Santa Cruz Province was created from a former sheep estancia — 286,000 hectares of steppe that overgrazing had reduced to near-desert — and in the decade since its establishment, the guanacos have returned, the huemul deer are recovering, and the native coiron grassland is reasserting itself across terrain that the sheep had left bare. The restoration programme, managed by Rewilding Argentina, has documented a 70% increase in large mammal biomass in ten years. The landscape that is returning is what Patagonia looked like before European settlement.

Parque Nacional Patagonia covers 286,000 hectares in the Lago Buenos Aires and Perito Moreno departments of Santa Cruz Province, established in 2014 from former sheep estancias and expanded in 2018. The park is one of the most significant large-scale ecological restoration projects in the Americas — the removal of sheep and fencing, combined with active guanaco and puma management, has produced measurable recovery of the native Patagonian steppe ecosystem within a decade. The South Andean huemul deer (Hippocamelus bisulcus), classified as endangered by the IUCN and present in the park in critically small numbers, is the subject of an active monitoring programme. The park protects a section of the Pinturas River valley south of Cueva de las Manos, extending the rock art site's landscape protection into a broader ecosystem context. The former estancia infrastructure has been converted to visitor facilities without significant architectural modification.