Perito Moreno National Park

Perito Moreno National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Perito Moreno National Park is not the famous glacier. The glacier of that name lies in Los Glaciares National Park near El Calafate, and every tour sold under the words Perito Moreno goes there; this park is a remote reserve of mountains, lakes and steppe in the north-west of Santa Cruz province, four or five hours by gravel road from the nearest town, Gobernador Gregores, and about three hundred kilometres from El Calafate. Nothing is sold online for it, and that is its character. Entry is free, registration at the ranger station at the entrance is compulsory, and the park has no shops, fuel, restaurants or mobile signal;

visitors bring everything, camp at the free campsites or stay at the one estancia inside the boundary, and drive the few tracks themselves in a vehicle that can cope with gravel and river fords. Guided visits are arranged privately with outfitters in Gobernador Gregores or Los Antiguos, or as part of long Patagonian road trips along Route 40 that stop for a day or two. The park is the opposite of El Calafate's polished tourism, and for people who want Patagonia as it was, that is the reason to come.

Visiting Perito Moreno National Park: what you will see

The park was created in 1937, one of Argentina's oldest, and named after Francisco Moreno, the explorer who mapped Patagonia and gave land for the country's first parks; it covers about 1,270 square kilometres of Andean foothills at around 900 metres, expanded in 2013 with land bought and rewilded by the Tompkins conservation foundation. A chain of lakes lies in the valleys, Belgrano, Burmeister, Volcán and Nansen among them, each a different blue or green, with Lake Belgrano's peninsula the classic walk. The mountains close the western horizon, with Cerro San Lorenzo, Patagonia's second highest peak at 3,706 metres, just outside the boundary and usually in cloud.

The steppe on the eastern side is guanaco country, with herds of hundreds, and the park is one of the strongholds of the huemul, the endangered Andean deer, which is seen along the forest edges in the early morning; pumas are present and occasionally seen, and condors, black-chested buzzard eagles and flamingos on the lakes complete the birdlife. The Casa de Piedra rock shelter has paintings left by hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago. Lenga beech forest lines the lakeshores and turns red in autumn. The silence and the absence of other people are the main attraction.

Perito Moreno National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open from November to April; snow closes the roads for the rest of the year, and the ranger station is staffed only in season. December to February gives the mildest weather, but the wind blows hard all summer and temperatures drop below freezing at night even then; March and April bring autumn colour and calmer days.

Register at the entrance, carry fuel, food and water for the whole stay, and expect the gravel roads to take much longer than the map suggests. Allow two or three days including the drive in and out. The Cueva de las Manos, the cave of the painted hands, is on Route 40 to the north, and Los Antiguos on Lake Buenos Aires is the nearest town with services in that direction.