🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
El Calafate is one of those destinations that justify a trip to Patagonia all on their own. Looking out over the turquoise water of Lake Argentino, this town in Santa Cruz province grew at the pace of tourism until it became the base from which almost everyone visits the famous Perito Moreno Glacier. Its name comes from a humble thorny shrub with blue berries, the calafate, and from an old Tehuelche legend promising that whoever eats its fruit will always return to Patagonia.
What makes El Calafate unique is how close it is to one of the most striking natural wonders on the planet: Los Glaciares National Park, a Unesco World Heritage Site. Barely 80 kilometers away, the face of the Perito Moreno rises some 70 meters above the water and, every so often, puts on the spectacle of ice blocks calving into the lake with an unforgettable roar. This is no ordinary glacier: it advances, dams an arm of the lake and, periodically, breaks its own ice bridge in a phenomenon that draws the curious from all over the world.
But El Calafate is much more than its glacier. It's sailing between icebergs toward the Upsala and Spegazzini glaciers, walking in crampons on the blue ice, wandering the Laguna Nimez Reserve among flamingos, learning glaciology at the modern Glaciarium museum and closing the day with spit-roasted Patagonian lamb and a glass of wine. A warm guide to help you make the most of every day in this corner of the end of the world.
Long before the town existed, the land around Lake Argentino was the territory of the Tehuelche (Aónikenk), nomadic hunters who moved across the Patagonian steppe following the guanaco and the rhea. The lake was named "Argentino" by the explorer Francisco Pascasio Moreno on 15 February 1877. In the early 20th century the area was a crossing point for carters hauling wool to the port; near a large calafate shrub known as "la mata grande" (the big bush), the Pantín and Freile families set up a general store and lodging house around 1913, which gave rise to a waystation. The national government officially created the town by decree on 7 December 1927, the date taken as its founding, to consolidate settlement of the region. For decades El Calafate was a quiet ranching town, until the creation of Los Glaciares National Park (1937), its World Heritage designation (1981) and the tourism boom at the end of the century turned it into the main tourist center of southern Patagonia. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The immense province of southern Patagonia: Tehuelche land of the Cueva de las Manos, of the endless steppe and the sheep, of the tragic Patagonia Rebelde, of the glaciers of Perito Moreno and Fitz Roy, with El Calafate and El Chaltén as the gateways to a world of ice.
Read the history of Santa Cruz →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There's a town in Patagonia whose name is a promise: whoever eats the blue fruit of the calafate, a Tehuelche legend says, always returns. Travelers today taste it in preserves and liqueurs almost as a farewell ritual, without knowing they're repeating a thousand-year-old gesture: long before the town of El Calafate existed, the land around Lake Argentino was the territory of the Tehuelche, also known as the Aónikenk. They were nomadic hunters who crossed the immensity of the Patagonian steppe following their prey, mainly the guanaco and the rhea (choique), from which they got food, and hides for their shelters and clothing.
They lived in close relationship with a harsh environment of constant wind and long winters. The calafate, that thorny blue-berried shrub that would later give the town its name, was already part of their diet and their culture: they gathered it for food and loaded it with meaning through stories passed down from generation to generation.
The arrival of explorers and then European settlers at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th transformed that world forever. The advance of the wool estancias, disease and displacement drastically reduced the Indigenous peoples of the area, whose memory survives today in the place names, in the region's Tehuelche toponymy and in legends such as that of the calafate.
The town's name comes from a shrub: the calafate, whose scientific name is Berberis microphylla. It's a thorny plant typical of Argentine and Chilean Patagonia, roughly 1 to 1.5 meters tall, with yellow flowers and small dark blue berries that are edible and much prized. They're made into preserves, liqueurs and conserves that are now a classic local souvenir.
Patagonia's most famous legend revolves around this fruit: it's said that whoever eats calafate always returns. The spell is held in the berries, so the traveler who tastes them is destined to come back to the land where they did. The myth is Tehuelche in origin (and also associated with the Selk'nam of the south) and was taken up by Argentine and Chilean folklore.
There are several versions of the story. One tells of Koonex, an elderly Tehuelche healer who, unable to follow her people on the winter migration, is left behind and turns into a calafate shrub that offers food and shelter to the birds returning each spring. Another version tells of a forbidden love between a young woman named Calafate and a boy from another people, separated by a sorcerer who turns her into a thorny shrub. Whichever version, they all end the same way: the calafate calls you back.
The great lake on whose shore the town grew was named by the explorer Francisco Pascasio Moreno, one of the towering figures of Argentine exploration, who on 15 February 1877 gave it the name Lago Argentino. With a surface of some 1,415 km², it's the largest lake in Argentina; its water, a characteristic turquoise from the suspended glacial flour, is fed by meltwater from glaciers such as the Perito Moreno and the Upsala.
At the start of the 20th century the area was a crossing point for carters hauling wool to the ports. Near a large calafate shrub that served as a landmark and that the carters called 'la mata grande' (the big bush) or simply 'el calafate', the trader Armando Guillón had put up an adobe shack. Around 1913, the Pantín family, immigrants from La Coruña (Spain), and the Freile family bought the place and set up a general store and lodging house, giving rise to a waystation that in time became a settlement.
The official founding came by National Government decree on 7 December 1927, when it was ordered that several new towns be created to consolidate settlement of the region and the former National Land Directorate ordered the town plan to be laid out in the valley of the Calafate stream, south of the Santa Cruz river, on Lake Argentino. That date is taken today as El Calafate's anniversary. For several decades it was a quiet ranching town in the Santa Cruz interior.
El Calafate's fate was tied forever to Los Glaciares National Park, created in 1937 to protect an extraordinary system of glaciers, lakes and Andean-Patagonian forest. In 1981 Unesco declared it a World Heritage Site. The park covers some 600,000 hectares and forms part of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, one of the largest freshwater reserves on the planet, which feeds dozens of glaciers.
The jewel of the park, and the reason millions of people visit El Calafate, is the Perito Moreno Glacier. Its face measures around 5 km wide and rises some 70 meters above the surface of Lake Argentino, with considerable depth below the water. Unlike most of the world's glaciers, it historically stayed in relative balance: it advances under the gravitational force of the ice coming down from above, gaining mass at a rate similar to the rate it loses it, and its surface moves toward the face at up to about two meters a day. That constant movement causes enormous blocks of ice to calve and crash into the lake, the spectacle visitors come to the walkways for.
But what makes the Perito Moreno truly famous is the phenomenon of the ice bridge rupture. When the glacier's face crosses the lake and touches the Magallanes Peninsula, it forms a natural dam that separates the Brazo Rico from the rest of Lake Argentino and cuts off its drainage. The water in the arm, fed by rivers and streams such as the Mitre, the Rico and others, builds up and rises. Over time the water seeps through a subglacial channel that grows as the ice melts, until a tunnel forms and then an arch or 'bridge' of ice over the Canal de los Témpanos. When that bridge collapses, the water flows freely again and the levels even out. It's a natural cycle that has repeated many times through history.
For much of the 20th century, El Calafate was a quiet town in the Santa Cruz interior, tied to sheep ranching and the slow pace of the steppe. The transformation came through tourism. The designation of Los Glaciares National Park as a World Heritage Site in 1981, better roads and, above all, the nature tourism boom of the late 20th and early 21st centuries turned the Perito Moreno into a global icon and El Calafate into its gateway.
The opening of Comandante Armando Tola airport (FTE) in the early 2000s was decisive: it brought the destination within a three-hour direct flight of Buenos Aires and multiplied the arrival of domestic and international visitors. The town grew fast, adding hotels, hostels, restaurants, travel agencies and services along Avenida del Libertador, its backbone.
Today El Calafate lives on tourism: mini-trekking on the ice, boat trips among icebergs toward the Upsala and Spegazzini glaciers, the Glaciarium museum, the Laguna Nimez Reserve and the cuisine of spit-roasted Patagonian lamb draw travelers from all over the world. At the same time, the scientific community is watching the Perito Moreno closely: after decades of stability, since 2019 an accelerated retreat of its face has been documented — in 2025 it was some 385 meters, the largest in the historic series, and the thinning went from 0.34 to more than 5 meters a year — a process that could make the famous ice bridge ruptures rarer and rarer and that keeps the future of one of the planet's most famous glaciers under study.