🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Lanín National Park stretches across the southwest of Neuquén province, in the Andes, near the Chilean border, and protects a magnificent territory of Andean-Patagonian forests, glacial lakes, rivers and volcanoes. Its great emblem is the Lanín volcano, an almost perfect cone of some 3,700 metres covered in snow and ice, which dominates the landscape and is visible from much of the park. Lanín also holds extensive forests of araucaria (pehuén), raulí, roble pellín and other species, some found only in this region.
The park is a paradise of lakes — Lácar, Huechulafquen, Paimún, Lolog, Tromen, Quillén, among many others — with crystal-clear water, ringed by mountains and forest, ideal for boating, fly fishing (world famous), kayaking and doing nothing at all. Its base towns are San Martín de los Andes, on Lago Lácar, and Junín de los Andes, the 'trout capital of Neuquén'. The park shares its territory with Mapuche communities, who take part in its management and in tourism.
This guide covers the essentials of Lanín National Park with a practical eye: the Lanín volcano and its access points, the Huechulafquen, Paimún and Lácar lakes, the araucaria forests, fly fishing, treks and lookouts, the Chapelco ski resort, Mapuche culture, where to stay and eat, and how to get there. It's one of the most beautiful parks in northern Patagonia, with the Lanín volcano as an unforgettable backdrop.
Lanín National Park was created in 1937 to protect the Andean-Patagonian forests, the lakes and the Lanín volcano of southwestern Neuquén, including the araucaria forests and tree species found only in the region. It's the historic territory of the Mapuche people, who live in the area and take part in its management. The Lanín volcano is a Natural Monument and a symbol of Neuquén province. 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's a tree in this park that can be more than a thousand years old and still bears fruit every autumn: the araucaria, or pehuén, whose pine nut fed generation after generation of the people who take its name, the Pehuenche. Walking today under those umbrella-shaped crowns, with the snowy Lanín volcano rising in the background, is walking through a landscape that has barely changed in the last thousand years, something almost unheard of in 21st-century Patagonia.
The territory of Lanín National Park has been, since ancestral times, the land of the Mapuche people, who live in the region of lakes and forests of southwestern Neuquén and keep a deep relationship with this landscape of mountains, water and pehuenes (araucarias). For the Mapuche, the Lanín volcano, the lakes and the forests hold value that is not only material — as a source of resources, among them the araucaria pine nut — but also spiritual and cultural, woven into their worldview.
The Lanín volcano, with its almost perfect snowy cone rising above 3,700 metres, dominates the whole landscape and is an unavoidable landmark in the region. Its silhouette, visible from much of the park and reflected in the lakes, made it a symbol of the place and, later, of Neuquén province. The name 'Lanín' itself comes from Mapudungun, and is usually linked to the idea of a crag or rock that sinks or dies, referring to the mountain.
The Mapuche presence in the region isn't only historical: numerous communities live today inside and around the park, and take part in its management and in tourism, providing services, camping and experiences in areas such as the Huechulafquen and Paimún lakes. That coexistence between the protected area and the Indigenous communities is one of the distinctive features of Lanín, where conserving nature is interwoven with the living culture of the Mapuche people.
Lanín National Park was born on 11 May 1937, when Decree 105.433 of President Agustín P. Justo declared four large territories in Patagonia — this corner of southwestern Neuquén among them — national reserves destined to become national parks, in the founding stage of the Argentine park system, with the aim of protecting the Andean-Patagonian forests, the lakes and the Lanín volcano. Its creation preserved a stretch of the range of enormous natural and scenic value, with a remarkable botanical feature: the presence of tree species that in Argentina are found only, or mostly, in this region.
Among those forests, the araucaria (pehuén) stands out, the thousand-year-old tree sacred to the Mapuche, which covers the higher slopes, along with forests of raulí, roble pellín, coihue and other species of the Valdivian and Andean-Patagonian woodland. That tree diversity, part of it exclusive or nearly exclusive to this Andean strip, makes Lanín a botanically exceptional park as well as a refuge for Patagonian wildlife.
Over time, the growth of San Martín de los Andes — on Lago Lácar — and of Junín de los Andes established Lanín as one of the great tourist destinations of northern Patagonia. World-famous fly fishing, boat trips on the lakes, trekking, the climb up the volcano and, in winter, skiing at Cerro Chapelco drew visitors from all over the world. Today Lanín combines the conservation of its forests and lakes, the living presence of Mapuche culture and first-rate nature tourism, always under the imposing gaze of the volcano that gives it its name.
For centuries, southwestern Neuquén was Mapuche territory and the land of the mountain passes that linked both sides of the Andes. That autonomy was broken by the so-called Conquest of the Desert, the military offensive by the Argentine state that between 1878 and 1885 subdued the Indigenous peoples of Patagonia, stripping them of much of their land and bringing the region under state control. Junín de los Andes, founded in 1883 as a fort during that campaign, is the oldest town in Neuquén and a testimony to that process.
After the military conquest came settlement: ranchers, European immigrants and criollo settlers moved into the valleys, taking up cattle raising and logging. San Martín de los Andes was founded on 4 February 1898 on the shore of Lago Lácar, by Colonel Celestino Pérez under orders from General Rudecindo Roca, with the explicit aim of asserting Argentine sovereignty in a sensitive area: unlike most Patagonian lakes, the Lácar is one of the few that drains towards the Pacific, through the Hua Hum river and the Valdivia basin, which made it strategically delicate in the boundary dispute with Chile. Soldiers, civilians and also members of the Mapuche people took part in that founding, and their presence still marks the identity of the town. The region spent decades as a frontier zone of cattle and timber, before the value of its landscapes drove its protection.
The Mapuche communities, far from disappearing, persisted and resisted, and today they claim and exercise rights over a good part of this territory. The story of Lanín is, for that reason, also the story of the tension and the coexistence between the state, the settlers and the Indigenous peoples, a process still alive in the shared management of several areas of the park.
Lanín National Park is today one of Argentina's most advanced examples of co-management with Indigenous peoples. Numerous Mapuche communities live within the park's boundaries, and from the late 20th century joint management arrangements were developed between the National Parks Administration and the communities, which run sectors, provide tourism services (campgrounds, meals, crafts, guided outings) and take part in decisions about the territory. Collecting the entry fee at gates such as Huechulafquen, run by communities, is a concrete expression of that model.
On the environmental side, the park faces challenges such as invasive species (red deer, wild boar, pines), forest fires and tourist pressure on sensitive sectors, like the fragile araucaria forests. Conserving the pehuén, a thousand-year-old sacred tree, is a priority, both for its ecological and its cultural value. Monitoring wildlife — pudú, huemul, condor, forest birds — and restoring degraded environments are part of the job.
On the tourism side, Lanín has established itself as one of the great destinations of northern Patagonia: world-famous fly fishing, the Ruta de los 7 Lagos, skiing at Chapelco, the climb up the volcano and boat trips on the lakes draw travelers from all over the world. The balance between that flow of visitors, the conservation of an exceptional natural heritage and the rights of the Mapuche communities defines the present and the future of this emblematic park.