🇦🇷 Argentina · The Northeast and Mesopotamia
El Palmar National Park protects one of the most photogenic landscapes in the Argentine Northeast: extensive groves of yatay, a native palm that can live for centuries, standing out against the sky on the shore of the Uruguay River, in east-central Entre Ríos province. Created in 1966, it preserves more than eight thousand hectares of palm groves, grassland, scrub and gallery forest.
Walking El Palmar is stepping into a postcard: trails crossing forests of very tall palms, viewpoints over the Uruguay River, streams with small waterfalls and abundant, visible wildlife. It's very common to come across families of capybaras resting in the grass, to see vizcachas, foxes, tegu lizards and an enormous variety of birds: the park holds more than two hundred species, which makes it a paradise for birdwatchers.
Because of its location, on National Route 14 between Colón and Concordia, El Palmar is easy to visit as a day trip from either of those hot-spring towns on the Uruguay River, or by basing yourself at its campsite. Golden sunsets among the palms, capybaras in plain sight and the river as a backdrop: a must in Entre Ríos and in the whole Mesopotamia region.
El Palmar National Park was created in 1966 to protect one of the last great yatay palm groves (Butia yatay) surviving in the region, since the advance of farming and ranching had drastically reduced these native woodlands. The yatay palm, a long-lived native species, is the soul of the park and gives it its identity. The natural history and the creation of the park are on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The Mesopotamian province between the Paraná and the Uruguay: land of Charrúas and Minuanes, stronghold of the federalism of Urquiza —the victor of Caseros—, cradle of Argentina's Jewish and Swiss colonies, of hot springs, palm groves and the carnival of Gualeguaychú.
Read the history of Entre Ríos →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
There are palms in El Palmar that were already standing when San Martín crossed the Andes. Specimens more than three hundred years old, weathered by the sun and the floods of the Uruguay River, still there today, almost untouched, while all around them the Entre Ríos landscape changed completely. That's the park's first surprise: it isn't just any woodland, it's a living archive going back to colonial times.
The absolute protagonist is a tree: the yatay palm (Butia yatay), a species native to the Argentine Northeast, southern Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. It's a robust, long-lived palm that can live between two and four centuries, and it adorns the landscape with its yellow flowers and its sweet, orange fruit — the yatay 'coquito' — traditionally used to make homemade preserves, liqueurs and a spirit typical of the Uruguay River shore known as 'yatay' or 'caña de palma'.
Yatay palm groves once covered extensive areas of eastern Entre Ríos: travelers and naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries described genuine seas of palms along the Uruguay River shore, from Concordia to Gualeguaychú. But those native woodlands face a fundamental difficulty: yatay palms take a very long time to grow and reach maturity, far longer than grassland or a crop. When cattle graze freely and the land is turned over to farming, the young palm shoots are eaten or removed before they can grow, and the grove stops regenerating. Without protection, a yatay woodland ages with no replacement, doomed to disappear along with its last elderly specimens: by the time anyone notices, it's too late.
Faced with that retreat, the answer was to turn one of the last great yatay groves into a protected area. On January 28, 1966, under Law No. 16,802, El Palmar National Park was created on the shore of the Uruguay River, in the Colón department, in east-central Entre Ríos, with the express aim of preserving a representative sample of this unique ecosystem and halting the disappearance of the native palm groves that, until the 19th century, covered much of eastern Entre Ríos.
The park covers 8,213 hectares (some historical sources say 8,350), where the palm groves coexist with grassland, espinal scrub and gallery forest along the streams and the river. By excluding cattle and intensive farming, the protected area allowed the grove to regenerate: alongside the centuries-old palms, young shoots now grow that secure the woodland's future. That is perhaps El Palmar's greatest quiet victory: it isn't only about conserving what was left, but about getting the woodland to reproduce again after a century of retreat.
Over the decades, the park also became a test case within Argentina's protected area system: because of its manageable size, its accessibility from National Route 14 and the abundance of easily seen wildlife, it turned into one of the most visited national parks in the country and a gateway to ecotourism for thousands of families having their first nature experience in the Northeast. Its closeness to the hot-spring towns of Colón and Concordia sealed it as a classic weekend destination in the Mesopotamia region.
By protecting the palm grove, the park also protects a whole community of animals that depend on it. El Palmar is today a refuge of abundant and, above all, visible wildlife: unlike other parks where animals are elusive, here it's common to come across families of capybaras — the largest rodent in the world — resting in the grass, to see vizcachas at the mouths of their burrows, foxes, tegu lizards and, with luck, rheas crossing the grassland.
The sky and the crowns of the palms belong to the birds: the park records more than two hundred species, among them parrots, parakeets, woodpeckers, cardinals, horneros and many more, which makes it a favorite destination for birdwatchers. That richness is possible because the park preserves several environments together — palm grove, grassland, scrub, gallery forest and the Uruguay River shore — each with its own community of plants and animals.
El Palmar is not only nature: the place also holds traces of a human presence going back more than three centuries, long before anyone thought of declaring it a national park. The jewel of that heritage is the ruins of the Calera del Palmar, also called the Calera de Barquín, one of the oldest colonial establishments in Entre Ríos.
Its story begins around 1650, when indigenous people from the Jesuit missions of the middle Uruguay River — mainly attached to the Yapeyú Reduction — set up a lime works at a spot known as Vuelta de San José, using the deposits of organic limestone that outcrop on the bluff. For more than a century, the Society of Jesus worked that lime kiln to supply building material to the missions and settlements of the region. Everything changed in 1767, when King Charles III signed the Pragmatic Sanction ordering the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spanish dominions; the following year, the governor of the Río de la Plata, Francisco de Paula Bucarelli y Ursúa, organized an expedition of 1,500 soldiers to enforce the order in the Guaraní Missions.
After the expulsion, the 'temporalities' — the property confiscated from the Jesuits — passed to the Crown. On March 12, 1778, the first viceroy of the Río de la Plata, Pedro de Ceballos, appointed as administrator Manuel Antonio Barquín, a merchant from Cantabria, who bought the Jesuit lime kiln from the Santa Fe Temporalities Board and put it back into operation. Since then the place has been known as the Calera de Barquín, a name that combines the Jesuit legacy with that of the Spanish merchant who kept it running commercially.
Today the site preserves the remains of two kilns for making quicklime, a stone jetty, three buildings and a cemetery: stone structures more than four meters high, raised with a mortar of lime, clay and sand, plus a tunnel that connected the works with the Uruguay River to make it easier to load the output onto boats. It is, in practice, one of the best-preserved colonial complexes in the province, and heritage organizations have for years been calling for firmer protection and restoration of these Jesuit ruins.
Further back in time, even before the Jesuits arrived, the region was the territory of native peoples — Charrúa and Guaraní, among others — and the Uruguay River was always a route of movement and contact between cultures. Those historical remains, along with the 'Tierra de palmares' Visitor Center with its educational panels, help you understand the park not as an 'untouched' landscape but as a territory with a long and complex relationship between people, the river and the palm grove: first as a resource for colonial extraction, then as a farming frontier that almost finished off the groves, and finally as a protected area now preserved for future generations.