🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Caviahue and Copahue are two mountain villages in the northwest of Neuquén province, at the foot of the Copahue volcano, in the Andes, near the border with Chile. They make up a double, complementary destination: Caviahue, on the shore of the lake of the same name and surrounded by araucaria forests (pehuenes), is a mountain and ski resort in winter and a base for trekking and nature in summer; Copahue, higher up, is one of the best-known thermal spa complexes in Argentina and South America, famous for its volcanic waters and muds with therapeutic properties.
The landscape is high volcanic mountain: the imposing Copahue volcano (active), lagoons stained by minerals, waterfalls, wet meadows, thousand-year-old araucaria forests and, in winter, everything covered in snow. Caviahue has a ski resort on the slopes of the volcano, while Copahue —which operates mainly in the warm season— draws those looking for thermal treatments, mud therapy and wellness in a unique setting. It's a less crowded destination than others in Patagonia, and one with a lot of character.
This guide covers the essentials of Caviahue-Copahue with a practical eye: the ski resort and winter activities, the hot springs and muds of Copahue, the treks to the waterfalls, the araucarias and the volcano in summer, where to stay and eat, and how to get there. It's one of the most distinctive corners of Neuquén's Patagonia, where the volcano, the araucarias and the hot springs come together in a single landscape.
The Caviahue-Copahue area, in the historic territory of the Mapuche-Pehuenche people, was valued from ancient times for its volcanic hot springs. Copahue developed in the 20th century as a leading thermal spa center, and Caviahue emerged as a tourist and ski village at the foot of the Copahue volcano, in a setting of araucarias and lakes of glacial and volcanic origin. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of volcanoes, lakes and the araucaria: Pehuenche and Mapuche land in northern Patagonia, world capital of the giant dinosaurs, heart of the Vaca Muerta shale and gateway to the Route of the Seven Lakes.
Read the history of Neuquén →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There are few places on the planet where you can ski on the slope of an active volcano and, a few kilometers away, sink into hot mud born of its innards. That place exists in northwestern Neuquén and it has two names: Caviahue and Copahue. But long before ski passes and thermal treatments, this region was —and still is— part of the historic territory of the Mapuche-Pehuenche people, the 'people of the pehuén', named for their intimate relationship with the araucaria, the pehuén, whose seeds (the pine nuts) were a staple food. The thousand-year-old araucaria forests that cover the area give the whole of this land its name (Pehuenia) and remain a sacred, central element of local culture.
The Indigenous peoples had long known and valued the particularities of this volcanic landscape: the hot waters, the muds and the vapors that sprang from the ground at the foot of the volcano. The name 'Copahue' itself refers, in the Mapuche language, to the idea of sulfur or sulfurous waters, alluding to the characteristic hot springs of the area. Those springs, tied to the volcano's activity, were recognized for their healing properties long before any tourist development.
The Copahue volcano, active, is the heart of the whole system: from its activity come the thermal waters, the muds, the gases and the mineral-stained lagoons that define the landscape. That combination of volcano, araucarias and sulfur waters has made, since remote times, an exceptional setting, loaded with meaning for the Indigenous peoples and with a natural and therapeutic value that time would only confirm.
Through the 20th century, the recognized therapeutic value of Copahue's waters and muds drove its development as a thermal spa center. Facilities were built to make use of the springs —pools, lagoons, mud baths, steam rooms— and Copahue established itself as one of the leading thermal complexes in Argentina and South America, drawing visitors seeking treatment for skin conditions, rheumatic complaints and others. Because of its great altitude and harsh climate, the village of Copahue operates mainly in the warm season, when the access roads are clear.
Further down, on the shore of Lake Caviahue and in a setting of araucarias, the village of Caviahue grew as a permanent tourist hub and service base. Caviahue oriented itself toward year-round mountain tourism: a ski resort on the slopes of the Copahue volcano in winter, and a base for trekking, nature and excursions to the waterfalls and lagoons in summer. The village offers lodging, food and services, complementing what Copahue offers in thermal treatments.
That is how today's double destination took shape: Caviahue as a mountain and ski village, and Copahue as a summer thermal complex, both set in the same spectacular volcanic landscape. The presence of the active volcano —which in some episodes has shown activity and forced precautions— is part of the identity and the rhythm of the place. Today, Caviahue-Copahue is one of the most distinctive and least crowded corners of Neuquén's Patagonia, where the volcano, the araucarias, the snow and the hot springs live side by side.
Although the Copahue hot springs already had national recognition from the first decades of the 20th century —when the provincial and national governments began to regulate and promote the medicinal use of their waters—, the village of Caviahue proper is a recent creation. It was founded in 1986 by the government of Neuquén province with the aim of giving the thermal area a stable town, habitable year-round and with tourist services, since Copahue, because of its altitude and climate, stayed closed and uninhabited for much of the year.
The site chosen, on the shore of Lake Caviahue (or Lake Agrio) and surrounded by araucaria forests, offered a more sheltered and accessible setting than the spa village. From its founding, Caviahue was planned as a mountain resort: within a few years the ski resort was developed on the slopes of the Copahue volcano, hotels, cabins, shops and infrastructure were built, and the town grew as a permanent base for winter snow tourism and summer tourism of hot springs and nature.
In this way Caviahue and Copahue ended up integrated, administratively and touristically, into a single municipality, Caviahue-Copahue, combining two complementary profiles: the mountain village inhabited all year and the summer thermal complex. That deliberate planning explains the orderly character and human scale of the destination, very different from Patagonia's big resort towns that grew on their own.
The Copahue volcano, about 2,965 meters high and sitting right on the border between Argentina and Chile, is one of the most closely watched active volcanoes in the Andes. Its crater holds an acid lagoon —the crater lagoon, an intense turquoise from its high concentration of sulfur and dissolved metals— whose chemistry is directly tied to the Copahue hot springs: the volcano's hydrothermal system is, literally, the source of the waters and muds that made the region famous. It's an andesitic-basaltic stratovolcano, with a long eruptive history of thousands of years that shaped the relief of the whole area, including the colored lagoons and the fumarole fields of Las Maquinitas.
Among the most recent and best remembered events, in December 2012 and through 2013 Copahue produced a series of phreatomagmatic eruptions with emissions of ash and gases and increased seismic activity, which led the authorities to declare a red alert and preventively evacuate part of the population and the tourists of Caviahue and Copahue, as well as temporarily affecting nearby Chilean towns because of the ash drift. Minor episodes of activity and ash emission repeated in later years (among them, new records of volcanic tremor and thermal anomalies detected by satellite), which keeps the volcano under permanent monitoring by SEGEMAR and by the Chilean agencies, through the Southern Andes Volcano Observatory (OVDAS) and its Argentine counterpart, the Observatorio Argentino de Vigilancia Volcánica.
Far from driving tourism away for good, this coexistence with a living volcano is part of the identity of the place: the same geological power that demands caution is what feeds the hot springs, carves the colored lagoons and shapes a unique landscape, with its centuries-old araucaria forests growing literally on top of ancient lava flows. Today Caviahue-Copahue markets itself as a destination of extreme nature and wellness, where tourist activity goes on normally following official guidance on the state of the volcano, and where every season thousands of visitors arrive drawn by the unique combination of snow, hot springs, thousand-year-old araucarias and the ever-latent presence of the mountain that gives the whole landscape its meaning.