Where to Stay and Play in Patagonia in South America

There’s a point near the start of Che Guevara’s classic travelogue The Motorcycle Diaries when the young Marxist revolutionary crosses from his native Argentina into the unknown wilderness of Chilean Patagonia. “What do we leave behind when we cross each frontier?” he asks as he embarks on a nine-month quest to check the pulse of South America. “Each moment seems split in two; melancholy for what was left behind and the excitement of entering a new land.” 

This scene, set in the remote Andes in 1952, gets limited page time in Guevara’s scrappy coming-of-age memoir, which his family released posthumously in 1992. Yet in the Walter Salles film of the same name, which came out in 2004, it’s the moment that really propels the narrative into action. Guevara (played by Gael García Bernal), who was a medical student at the time, and his companion, biochemist Alberto Granado (Rodrigo de la Serna), sail across a fjord-like lake, then travel onward into Chile, their motorcycle dwarfed by granite peaks as they navigate snowy roads. 

I remember watching The Motorcycle Diaries 20 years ago on an art-house screen in Washington, D.C., and being struck by those images; the frosty Patagonian forests were so different from what I’d imagined South America to look like. The color of that lake—teal and radiant, like liquid peacock feathers—lingered in my mind. I moved to Chile 10 years later but let another decade slip away before I decided to cross those same Andes myself. 

Until recently, it wasn’t practical for American tourists to follow Guevara’s path by starting in Argentina; they were better off going in reverse, beginning in Chile and crossing into Argentina, then back again. Now it’s possible to streamline the journey by flying into Bariloche, Argentina, traversing the Andes by land and water—the way Guevara did—then flying to the Chilean capital of Santiago via El Tepual Airport. Not only is the transport smoother, allowing more time in the northern-Patagonian wilderness, but there are also now several alluring hotels in the newly tony towns on either end. 

I fly to Argentina on the first day of the austral fall. The jet is packed with Brazilians in parkas, eager for the snow their own country largely lacks. Yet, when we land at Bariloche’s small airfield on the northwestern edge of the Patagonian steppe, we find butterscotch plains, scrubby hillocks, and aggressive sunbeams. It’s not until about an hour later, when I arrive at my hotel, Villa Beluno, that I enter the leafier, loftier Patagonia of popular imagination. 

Ranging from 936 square feet to more than 1,700, the 13 suites of Villa Beluno, the first true luxury hotel to open here since 1940, overlook Nahuel Huapi National Park and its namesake lake west of downtown Bariloche. Not far away is South America’s largest ski resort, Catedral Alta; squint a bit and this could be Switzerland. Bariloche’s earliest European settlers—many of whom were Swiss—even imported their fondness for chocolate, fondue, and chalet-style architecture. 

Cristina Lopez, the chef-owner of Villa Beluno, says that Bariloche, like many global mountain towns, boomed during the pandemic, swelling by about 35,000 people to 160,000. The new arrivals, mostly from Buenos Aires, brought with them traffic and housing problems but also art galleries and ambitious culinary projects, including the new tasting-menu restaurant Quetro, which seats 12 guests around an open kitchen. Add in more than two dozen craft breweries—many, including Cerveza Patagonia, with sweeping lakefront terraces—and it can be tempting to plant roots. But I didn’t come to Patagonia to stay still. 

Guevara made his journey on a Norton 500 motorcycle; opting for a more active adventure, I will do several stages by e-bike. But first, before I hop in the saddle, I need to cross to the far side of Lake Nahuel Huapi. 

Was it destiny that led Nahuel the boy to make Nahuel the park his life’s work? He thinks so. Nahuel Alonso’s mother, Patricia Barnadas, named him for the park sight unseen, brought him here on vacation when he was 5, and two months later traded their home on Ibiza, for the sinewy island of Victoria, at the heart of Lake Nahuel Huapi. Today, Alonso is the founder of Esencia Travel, a B-Corp–certified tour operator. Esencia has charted my path across the border, which will deviate slightly from Guevara’s in order to avoid the more populated tourist route that has sprouted since the revolutionary’s era. 

“I love bringing people back to the place where I grew up because it’s like I’m returning to my kingdom to play,” Alonso says, noting that the name he shares with this park means “puma” in the Indigenous Mapudungun language (and was a rather unconventional choice for a kid born in Spain). 

Alonso spent his formative years on Victoria Island, in the mint-green home of the park ranger who became his stepdad, roaming the vast Nahuel Huapi like an aspirant Robinson Crusoe. He crafted his first sailboat at age 7 and started hunting for dinners soon after. There was no school, so Barnadas started one for him. Six other kids attended when they weren’t fishing, hiking, or biking. 

Alonso still enjoys the latter, so together we cycle over to his old school. Dirt paths cut through a dense forest of coigue trees, where the world’s largest woodpeckers tap their scarlet heads. High-touch clients including Richard Gere, Gisele Bündchen, and the Obama family have joined Alonso for trips here; when Al Gore passed through Victoria Island in 2013, Alonso helped him plant a coigue next to the school. “I grew up in a park-ranger family,” he explains. “So, for me, it’s been a life process to be a host.” 

One of Esencia’s roaming chefs, Pedro Martinet, prepares a lunch of cured deer, pickled trout, and Patagonian Pinot when we arrive at a nearby beach, Bahía Totora. We dine barefoot at a table placed in ankle-deep water. It’s the third day of autumn, but summer still clings to the land. The glaciers of Monte Tronador shimmer under sunbeams in the western sky as teenagers splash in the frigid meltwaters of the neighboring bay. Guevara, after swimming in the same locale, wrote that it felt as if “fingers of ice were gripping me all over my body,” but the modern-day teens seem to enjoy it just fine. 

Leaving Victoria Island, I skip the sardine-packed crowds of the bus-and-boat tour across Puerto Blest and instead roll my e-bike onto Alonso’s 48-foot power catamaran for the first leg across Nahuel Huapi. The lake is shaped a bit like an octopus, and our destination, Villa La Angostura, is about an hour’s ride down one of its northern tentacles. 

We dock at sunset at Hotel Las Balsas, a Relais & Châteaux property with a distinctive twilight-blue facade. The hotel’s main building is wood-clad, cozy, and a bit creaky, warmed by a central hearth and blanketed in the darkly expressionist art of Argentine painter Alfredo Prior. I opt instead for one of Las Balsas’s new villas, opened earlier this year, so I can sleep suspended amid the forest in a modernist glass cube. 

Cerro Bayo, another peak with a ski resort, carves an angular silhouette along the horizon when I awake the following morning. Below it, the diminutive town of La Angostura has an everyman air that belies the wealth of its residents, like an Argentine Jackson Hole. On the same bay as Las Balsas sits the home of former president of Argentina Mauricio Macri. Queen Máxima of the Netherlands frequently vacations at the Cumelén Country Club, a gated community one bay to the east whose multimillionaire residents pull the levers of the Argentine economy. Guevara would surely spin in his grave. 

The next day, to save—and a whole lot of uphill pedaling—I swap two wheels for four to cross into Chile. Barnadas, Alonso’s mom, takes the driver’s seat for the three-hour car journey, which begins with a trip up to the border post at 4,300 feet, skirting the disaster zone of one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the 21st century. Barnadas says that when Chile’s Cordón Caulle fissure blew in 2011, she first thought that the ash blanketing her lawn in Bariloche was snow. “It took us months to clean up the mess,” she says. As we depart Argentina, reminders of that eruption are all around us, including forests burnt to sticks and dunes of steel-gray ash. 

Barnadas passes me a gourd of the highly caffeinated herbal drink yerba maté, and we wind onward, down the far side of the Andes. It’s clear almost immediately that the air in Chile is wetter, thicker, cloudier. The forests, too, take on Lord of the Rings qualities, draped in fungi and mosses. “It’s wild to me how, in just a few kilometers, crossing what is really just a theoretical line, you actually feel like you’re in another country,” says Barnadas, her long silver hair flapping out the window. 

We reach flat terrain near Llanquihue, a lake so vast it resembles an inland sea. Perfectly conical volcanic peaks, dusted in snow, rise like sentries across the horizon. I part ways with Barnadas at the cow town of Las Cascadas, linking up with Chile’s longest bike path—56 miles in total—for a ride around the lake’s edge, to Hotel Awa. 

This all-inclusive adventure lodge, my final stop, appears from the outside like a cold concrete brutalist building, but the 25 rooms all welcome in light and nature with floor-to-ceiling windows that frame the Osorno Volcano. “Reinforced concrete allows for large openings that can bring the outside in,” explains architect and owner Mauricio Fuentes, who built Awa on the site of his family’s vacation home. “It’s a very rationalist architecture because the building had to be a link between shelter and landscape, so that the lake and volcano are the protagonists.” 

Fuentes covered the interiors in cypress and native alerce wood, adding warmth to balance the concrete. Rooms also have fireplaces, handsome furnishings, and fluffy Mapuche blankets, on top of which poems by Pablo Neruda arrive each night along with chocolates. 

The hotel lies east of the resort town Puerto Varas, which was settled in the 19th century by Germans. These early immigrants shingled their homes with alerce wood, giving the downtown its storybook aesthetic. Like Bariloche, Puerto Varas boomed during the pandemic with remote white-collar workers fleeing the capital. They’ve since opened cultural centers including the Centro de Arte Molino Machmar, which features art exhibitions, theater performances, and a cinema, plus Chilean wine bars such as La Vinoteca, all while driving real-estate prices to some of the highest in the Southern Cone. 

“When I was little, Puerto Varas was so small that people from Santiago had no idea where I was from,” recalls Awa’s commercial manager, Susan Espinosa, who grew up speaking German at home. “During the pandemic, everyone from the capital bought land here and settled along the lake. In that first year alone, 1,000 lots were sold. So now everyone knows of Puerto Varas.” 

It’s a rare bluebird day when I awake the next morning, so I meet with guide Jorge Gomez to plot a trip up the Calbuco Volcano. It last erupted in 2015 and speaks to the more volatile nature of these Chilean Andes. An hour later we’re off on foot, following an old lava flow for 10 miles as it carves a black scar through the temperate rainforests. 

Gomez is a bespectacled human textbook who literally wears a feather in his cap. As we walk, he lets loose a barrage of facts—mostly about his favorite tree, the alerce, which is indigenous to this region alone (hence its other moniker, Patagonian cypress). Recent studies have found that alerces have such astounding longevity that one just north of here may be 5,486 years old, which would make it the oldest living tree on Earth. 

We dip in and out of dense forests before reaching a lookout at the base of Calbuco. Gazing at its non-conical summit—it bows in the middle, cradling a patch of fresh snow—only fuels my desire to get closer to that other volcano, Osorno, which has loomed large outside my window since I arrived. So, the next morning, Gomez and I pedal e-bikes to Vicente Pérez Rosales National Park, where the weather is characteristically ominous. Within the hour there are showers and strong gales. When we arrive at the volcano’s base, Gomez says that, for safety reasons, we shouldn’t venture higher than its relatively low-altitude “red crater,” one of about a dozen cavities that pockmark its slopes. 

The path rises skyward through a lunar landscape of slate-gray scree, with no vegetation in sight. When we reach the crater, all we can make out are the iron-laced rocks beneath our boots, which look like petrified pomegranates. “We should be viewing the summit of Osorno,” Gomez says, pointing through the mist to the northern sky. “And over there,” he adds, pointing east, “would be Tronador.” It’s the same mountain I saw back at Victoria Island, its glaciers gleaming in the Argentine sun. 

Down below, along the shores of Lake Todos los Santos, we let the howling winds dry our clothes. This very spot, it turns out, is where Guevara first rolled his motorcycle into Chile. The narrow channel is still teal-colored and radiant, and it’s as cloudy and ominous as it was on that movie screen 20 years ago. 

Todos los Santos can’t look much different today than it did when Guevara passed through back in 1952. In the end, I suppose that’s the beauty of northern Patagonia. Yes, the small villages on either side of the border have grown into posh resort towns, but the Andean in-between remains as it has always been: raw, feral, and unpredictable. 

“Perhaps one day, tired of circling the world, I’ll return to Argentina and settle in the Andean lakes,” wrote Guevara of his “profound longing” to come back to this region. “Only the Amazon jungle,” he said, “called out to that sedentary part [of me] as strongly as did this place.” Of course, his yearning for a simpler life in these mountains was not to be, as any history book will explain. Yet to travel here is to understand how easy it is to become enchanted by such a dream.