🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Camarones is a small, quiet coastal village in the province of Chubut, on the San Jorge Gulf, on the Patagonian Atlantic coast, between Trelew and Comodoro Rivadavia. Calm and full of fishing-town air, it keeps the flavor of the Patagonian coastal villages, with its bay, its low houses and its bond with the sea. It is the base for reaching the Patagonia Austral Interjurisdictional Coastal Marine Park, a protected area of great natural richness.
Its main draw is marine nature: close to Camarones is Cabo Dos Bahías, home to a major Magellanic penguin colony, as well as guanacos, maras and other Patagonian wildlife, and a coast of islands and gulfs protected by the marine park. Camarones also has a curious historical footnote: it was the village where Juan Domingo Perón spent part of his childhood, which gives it a place in the country's memory.
This guide covers the essentials of Camarones with a practical eye: the village and its bay, Cabo Dos Bahías and its penguin colony, the Patagonia Austral Interjurisdictional Coastal Marine Park, the fishing and the seafood, the nearby ghost village of Cabo Raso, where to stay and eat, and how to get there. It is a slice of authentic Patagonian coast, ideal for anyone after marine wildlife, quiet and sea views away from the busier circuits.
Camarones is an old coastal settlement in Chubut, formally founded in 1900, historically tied to fishing, sheep farming and the shipping of wool from its port, one of the most important in the region in the early 20th century. It is also known as the village where Juan Domingo Perón spent part of his childhood, on the family ranch nearby. Today it is the gateway to the Patagonia Austral Interjurisdictional Coastal Marine Park and to the Cabo Dos Bahías penguin colony. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The heart of Atlantic and Andean Patagonia: Tehuelche and Mapuche land, setting of the only large Welsh colony in the Americas, cradle of Argentine oil at Comodoro Rivadavia, home to the whales of Península Valdés and to the thousand-year-old forest of Los Alerces.
Read the history of Chubut →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Almost a hundred years before Buenos Aires existed as a city, there was already a Spanish attempt to found a city on this Patagonian coast. The year was 1535 when captain Simón de Alcazaba y Sotomayor landed at Caleta Hornos, barely 28 kilometers south of what is now Camarones, and founded Puerto de los Leones there: probably the first Spanish settlement in all of present-day Argentine territory, earlier even than Pedro de Mendoza's first founding of Buenos Aires (1536). It is a fact that surprises anyone visiting this small, quiet village, today a stranger to the country's great founding narratives: here stood, briefly, the first Spanish settlement in Argentina.
Alcazaba's dream did not last. The harshness of the Patagonian climate, the scarcity of resources and infighting among the expedition members themselves —including a mutiny that cost the captain his life— forced the settlement to be abandoned barely a few months after it was founded. The San Jorge Gulf coast passed back into the hands of its original inhabitants, the Tehuelche, hunter-gatherers adapted to the Patagonian immensity who had known the territory long before any European sail appeared on the horizon.
The name 'Camarones' (shrimp) would arrive centuries later, and its origin is simpler than many imagine: in the old days, this sheltered bay of the San Jorge Gulf teemed with a distinctive species of shrimp that passing sailors took as the mark of the place. That same bay —shielded from the wind and the open currents of the Atlantic— would be, centuries later, the reason a real village ended up settling here and not at some other point on the coast.
Almost four centuries after the fleeting Puerto de los Leones, the bay of Camarones drew attention again, this time to stay. From around 1890, sailors and traders began using this natural bay, sheltered from the wind and the open Atlantic swell, as a port to load and unload wool, hides and other produce from the ranches of the Chubut interior. Patagonia was then living the sheep-farming boom: vast stretches of steppe filled with flocks, and all that wool needed a shipping point toward markets overseas.
On October 10, 1900 the urban layout of Camarones was formally ordered, with a plan of 200 blocks that marks the date recognized today as the village's official founding. From then on, Camarones quickly established itself as a wool port of regional weight: in 1909 the first Sociedad Rural of Patagonia was set up there, and the so-called 'Camarones-type wool' came to earn international recognition for its quality, fetching good prices on Europe's wool markets.
Around that port activity the village grew into what it is today: low houses, fledgling commerce and a community that combined port life with country life, in one of the southernmost and roughest corners of the Argentine Atlantic coast. Over the decades, changes in transport —the dominance of overland routes and of deeper-water ports such as Comodoro Rivadavia— cost Camarones its prominence as an export point, but it never lost the coastal identity forged in the heat of those wool-boom years.
Camarones holds a singular place in Argentine memory for its link to Juan Domingo Perón, one of the most influential figures in the country's history. During his childhood the Perón family settled in Patagonia, in the Camarones area and its surroundings, working the region's countryside. The future president spent part of his early years there, in the rough, formative setting of the Chubut steppe and coast.
That early Patagonian experience —contact with the land, the horse, the austere life of the south— is part of the story of Perón's origins, and Camarones claims it as part of its identity and its historical heritage. Today it is remembered at the Perón Family Museum, housed in a building tied to the family's history. For a small, remote village on the Patagonian coast, having been the setting for the childhood of the man who would later be three times president of the nation is a source of pride and one more draw for visitors interested in Argentine history.
Like so many great Patagonian traditions, the National Salmon Festival of Camarones was not born of a tourism plan or an official decision, but of a group of friends who wanted to share their passion for fishing. The year was 1981 when, for that year's Holy Week, a group of anglers and neighbors organized at Caleta Sara —some 28 kilometers from Camarones— the first edition of what was then barely an informal gathering: a way to mark and celebrate the trade of a fishing village, with rods, boats and tents pitched at the water's edge.
For the first few years, until roughly 1987, the festival kept that homemade format, with neighbors and visitors arriving in their own vehicles loaded with tents, boats and fishing gear to spend the weekend competing for the best catch. Word of mouth did the rest: the festival grew edition after edition, until in 1990 the national government officially recognized it as a Fiesta Nacional, adding another title to the village's growing fishing identity.
Today the National Salmon Festival —which in its 2026 edition reached its 43rd running under the slogan 'Sé parte de la historia' (Be part of the story)— draws more than fifty boats competing over fishing days of more than six hours, chasing the biggest catch to take the prize. It is held between February and March, fills the village with activity, music and seafood, and is by far the event that brings the most people to this remote corner of the San Jorge Gulf all year. For Camarones, which went from being a short-lived Spanish fort to a thriving wool port and is today the gateway to one of the country's most important marine wildlife reserves, the festival is proof that its bond with the sea never stopped being the heart of its identity.
Through the 20th century, changes in transport and in the economy cost Camarones its old role as a wool-exporting port. The village entered a quieter stage, sustained by fishing, sheep farming and coastal life, keeping its small scale and its out-of-the-way character. What looked like a disadvantage —its distance from the main circuits— became, in time, its greatest asset: an almost untouched stretch of Patagonian coast, rich in nature.
Recognition of that value came with the protection of its surroundings. In 2008 the Patagonia Austral Interjurisdictional Coastal Marine Park was created, the first marine-coastal protected area of its kind in Argentina, managed jointly by the National Parks Administration and the province of Chubut, safeguarding a stretch of the San Jorge Gulf with its islands, islets and colonies of seabirds, sea lions and penguins. Alongside it is the Cabo Dos Bahías Nature Reserve, with its huge Magellanic penguin colony and its steppe wildlife.
So the old wool port reinvented itself as a nature and conservation destination. Historical memory —the wool, the port, Perón's childhood— and marine biodiversity now combine in this peaceful corner of the San Jorge Gulf, which draws those after wildlife, silence and sea landscapes away from the mass circuits.