🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
El Hoyo and Epuyén are two towns in the Comarca Andina del Paralelo 42, in northwestern Chubut, a fertile Andean pocket of small farms, forests, rivers and lakes barely 15 minutes from El Bolsón. El Hoyo is the National Capital of Berries — its farms grow raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants and sour cherries that turn into preserves, liqueurs and desserts — and it also hides two attractions that justify the detour on their own: the Laberinto Patagonia, the largest hedge maze in South America, and the Corbata Blanca waterfall, which you reach on foot from the town.
Epuyén, a little further south, is arranged around the placid Lake Epuyén, ringed by Andean-Patagonian forest, with beaches like the ones at Puerto Patriada for swimming, paddling a kayak and camping. It is a destination of quiet and farm life, with a strong presence of producers, artisans and people who came looking for a better quality of life. Both towns share the air of the Comarca: slow pace, artisanal food and a landscape of mountains and water of serene beauty.
For the traveler, El Hoyo and Epuyén are the gentlest, most rural face of the Chubut cordillera: farms where you buy berries and homemade preserves, the maze to get lost in as a family, waterfalls and lookouts, hiking on Cerro Currumahuida and beach days on Lake Epuyén. An ideal getaway from El Bolsón or Bariloche for anyone after nature, home cooking and the calm of the Andean valleys, far from the crowds of Patagonia's more famous destinations.
El Hoyo and Epuyén were settled at the start of the 20th century by Chilean and criollo settlers drawn by the fertile land of the Comarca Andina, who made their living from farming, berries and livestock. They are part of the Comarca Andina del Paralelo 42, a region with a shared identity straddling Chubut and Río Negro. The full version is on the 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.
There is one fact that surprises anyone visiting El Hoyo for the first time: this small Chubut village, barely a few blocks of dirt streets and farms scattered across the valley, holds the title of National Capital of Berries, and its raspberries travel as preserves to shop shelves all over the country. To understand how a handful of settler families ended up turning a remote corner of the Chubut cordillera into a byword for raspberries, you have to go back more than a century, to when this land did not even have a name on official Argentine maps.
The settlement of El Hoyo and Epuyén, in northwestern Chubut, is part of the occupation of the fertile Andean valleys of the province's northwest at the start of the 20th century. After Patagonia was incorporated into the Argentine state in the late 19th century — through the misnamed 'Conquest of the Desert', which violently displaced the indigenous communities already living there — this land of forest, rivers and farmable soil began to attract settlers.
Among the first inhabitants were settlers and families of Chilean origin — the border was close and the mountain passes far easier to cross than the road in from the Atlantic — and criollos, who took up farming, fruit growing, animal rearing and logging. The area's temperate, humid climate, with enough meltwater and mild summers free of late frosts, turned out to be especially suited to growing berries, a kind of fruit growing that barely prospers elsewhere in Patagonia because of the dry steppe climate.
The two towns grew as communities of smallholders, organized around rural holdings scattered through the valleys, without the centralized street grid of other Patagonian towns. Epuyén, for its part, developed beside the lake of the same name, in a setting of forest and mountain, with a life more tied to the water and to subsistence fishing in its early decades. Together with El Bolsón (in Río Negro) and Lago Puelo, both formed a region with a strong shared identity known today as the Comarca Andina del Paralelo 42.
El Hoyo and Epuyén are part of what is called the Comarca Andina del Paralelo 42, a region that gathers several towns on both sides of the border between Chubut and Río Negro, around latitude 42° S. The comarca shares a landscape, a climate and a culture: fertile valleys, Andean-Patagonian forests, rivers and lakes, and a population of smallholders, artisanal producers, artists and people drawn by the quality of life and the natural setting, many of them arriving in waves of internal migration from the 1970s and 1980s, after an alternative way of life in contact with the land.
Within that group, El Hoyo specialized in growing berries — raspberries, strawberries, redcurrants, blackcurrants, sour cherries, blackberries and others — thanks to the ideal conditions of its microclimate: enough winter cold for the plants to go dormant, mild summers without the late frosts that ruin the flowering, and a good supply of irrigation water from the Andean snowmelt. The activity gave rise to a thriving cottage industry of preserves, jams, liqueurs, syrups and desserts that are now sold at markets, at farms open to the public and in shops across the country, and it became a mark of identity: El Hoyo is officially recognized as the National Capital of Berries, a status it celebrates every summer, usually in January, with its national festival at the town's sports complex.
Epuyén, with its lake and its wooded surroundings, developed the profile of a quiet town, with producers, artisans and small businesses tied to nature and rural life. Puerto Patriada, on the northern shore of Lake Epuyén, has become in recent decades one of the most photographed corners of the Comarca: a spot where the forest runs right down to the water, with family kayak outings that combine paddling, homemade snacks and stories about the area. Over the last few decades tourism has been added to the Comarca's economy, drawn by the berries, the lakes, the waterfalls, the hiking and the serene atmosphere of these Andean valleys, complementing nearby and better-known El Bolsón.
Before the arrival of settlers and smallholders, the valleys of today's Comarca Andina were inhabited by indigenous peoples. The region was the territory of Tehuelche communities and, above all from the araucanization process of the 17th to 19th centuries, of Mapuche peoples who settled in the Andean valleys of northern Chubut. Many of the area's place names come from that presence, such as Epuyén ('two valleys' or 'two currents', depending on the reading of Mapudungun) and Currumahuida ('black mountain').
These peoples lived from hunting, gathering and, later, raising livestock, making use of the abundant water, forest and pasture of the valleys. The cordillera was not a barrier but a place to move through, with passes that connected both sides of the Andes and allowed exchange between communities in present-day Chile and in Argentine Patagonia.
The incorporation of Patagonia into the Argentine state in the late 19th century and the colonization that followed transformed that world, but the Mapuche-Tehuelche legacy is still alive in the place names, in some communities in the area and in the culture of the Comarca. Recognizing that indigenous root is part of understanding the deeper history of El Hoyo, Epuyén and the whole northwest of Chubut.
The summer of 2026 will stay in the memory of Epuyén and El Hoyo for one dramatic episode: on Monday 5 January, at around 3 p.m., a forest fire broke out some 300 meters from the access road to Puerto Patriada, the most visited spot on the northern shore of Lake Epuyén. Within days, fed by the wind and the dry summer vegetation, the fire moved toward the El Pedregoso area, crossed sectors close to National Route 40 and came to threaten homes at Callejón Mayorga and on the lakeshore itself.
The scale of the disaster forced precautionary evacuations in towns near El Hoyo and repeated closures of RN 40 between Epuyén and El Hoyo, while firefighting crews from all over Patagonia and water-bombing aircraft worked against a fire that, for several days, the smoke made impossible to fight from the air. Only around 16 January could the authorities declare the whole fire contained; it had burned an estimated 14,770 hectares, an area comparable to more than half of the City of Buenos Aires. The later investigation by the Lago Puelo prosecutor's office detected, using technical instruments, flammable gases consistent with the use of accelerants at the point of origin, which opened the hypothesis of deliberate human intervention.
The blow was so hard that the 38th National Berry Festival, due to be held from 9 to 11 January, had to be rescheduled: it finally took place on 29 and 30 January as a 'Benefit Festival', with part of the proceeds going to buy appliances and furniture for the families who lost their homes, to rebuilding with local labor and to fireproof SIP panels for the new houses. The episode, painful for the whole Comarca, also showed the community organizing capacity of El Hoyo and Epuyén, two towns used to solving their problems in-house, among neighbors, smallholders and volunteer firefighters.
Over the last few decades, El Hoyo and Epuyén have added to their traditional economy of farms and berries a growing tourism sector, tied to nature and to the serene atmosphere of the Comarca Andina. Lake Epuyén, the waterfalls and lookouts of El Hoyo, the hiking in the hills, the farms open to visitors and the National Berry Festival turned these towns into getaway destinations, complementing nearby and better-known El Bolsón.
That growth sits alongside a strong environmental commitment, typical of a region of producers and artisans very aware of their surroundings. Preserving the native forest, organic production and looking after the lakes and rivers are central concerns for these communities, which want to grow without losing the human scale and the quality of life that set them apart.
The Comarca has faced hard episodes throughout its history, such as the large forest fires that in different summers have hit the region's Andean-Patagonian forest — the one at Puerto Patriada in January 2026 is only the most recent and one of the largest — and that exposed the fragility of the ecosystem and how much its care matters. Despite these challenges, El Hoyo and Epuyén keep their identity: a fertile, quiet corner of the Chubut cordillera, where berries, forest, water and farm life still set the rhythm, even when the job at hand is rebuilding after the fire.