🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Los Alerces National Park is one of the great natural treasures of Argentine Patagonia and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the west of Chubut province, in the Andes, near the border with Chile. It protects one of the best-preserved forests in Patagonia, with its great jewel: the thousand-year-old alerces (lahuán), long-lived trees that can pass 2,000 or even 2,600 years of age, among the oldest living things on the planet.
The park combines those ancient forests with a spectacular landscape of lakes and rivers of clear, turquoise water: Lagos Futalaufquen, Verde, Menéndez and Rivadavia and the Río Arrayanes, among others, linked by a geography of mountains and Valdivian forest. Its most celebrated draw is the excursion to the Alerzal Milenario, on Lago Menéndez, where you can take in gigantic alerce specimens, among them 'El Abuelo', a tree more than 2,600 years old and the symbol of the park. It's a destination of pristine nature, less crowded than Bariloche.
This guide covers the essentials of Los Alerces National Park with a practical eye: the Alerzal Milenario and the boat trip on Lago Menéndez, the turquoise lakes and rivers, the treks and lookouts, fishing and water activities, basing yourself in Villa Futalaufquen and Esquel/Trevelin, where to stay and eat, and how to get there. It's a journey into the ancient forests and clear waters of Patagonian Chubut.
Los Alerces National Park was created on 11 May 1937 by Decree 105.433 of President Agustín P. Justo, to protect the alerce (lahuán) forests, thousand-year-old trees threatened by logging, along with the lakes and Valdivian woodland of western Chubut. In 2017 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the exceptional value of its temperate forests and its ancient alerces, such as 'El Abuelo', around 2,620 years old. The full story is on our 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.
When the Egyptians were raising the first pyramids, when Rome didn't yet exist even as a village, a tree was already growing, very slowly, in a damp corner of the Patagonian Andes. That tree — today we call it 'El Abuelo' — is still standing. It's probably one of the oldest living things a human being can reach out and touch anywhere in Argentina, and it's a few hours from Esquel.
The absolute protagonist of the park is the alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides), called lahuán by the Indigenous peoples, a conifer native to the temperate forests of Andean Patagonia and southern Chile. It's one of the longest-lived trees on the planet: some specimens pass 2,000 and even 3,000 years of age, which makes them contemporaries of very ancient civilizations. They grow very slowly, reach great heights and diameters, and form humid forests of extraordinary ecological value.
Precisely because of its longevity, its size and the quality of its wood — hard-wearing, durable and highly prized — the alerce was historically the object of intense logging. For decades, felling tore into these ancient forests, cutting down specimens that had taken centuries or millennia to grow and that wouldn't recover in many human generations. The pressure on the alerce put the species and its forests at risk, raising the alarm about the need to protect them.
That value — and that threat — was what drove the creation of the park. Protecting the last great alerce forests, especially the ancient stands such as the one at Lago Menéndez, became a conservation priority. Today the alerce is a protected species, a symbol of the fight to preserve Patagonia's natural heritage, and 'El Abuelo' — a specimen more than two millennia old — is the living emblem of the park and of that cause.
The threat to the alerce was neither new nor exclusively Argentine: since colonial times, in southern Chile, the extraction of this timber — extremely resistant to rot and much sought after for planks and shingles — had already wiped out the coastal alerce stands, forcing loggers to push further and further up the mountains in search of specimens. By the time the phenomenon repeated itself on the Argentine side of the range, in the early 20th century, the lesson was clear: without protection, a forest that takes millennia to form could disappear in barely a few decades of chainsaw work.
Los Alerces National Park was born on 11 May 1937, when Decree 105.433 of President Agustín P. Justo declared four large Patagonian territories national reserves destined to become national parks, in the founding stage of the Argentine park system. The central aim was to protect the alerce forests of western Chubut, threatened by logging, along with the lakes, rivers and Valdivian forests of the Andean region. A curious detail: for more than three decades, what is now Lago Puelo National Park, 115 km to the north, was administered as a simple 'annex' of Los Alerces, until Law 19.292 made it independent in 1971.
Unlike other Patagonian parks that turned into large mass-tourism centres, Los Alerces kept a quieter, more pristine profile, with its main base at Villa Futalaufquen, on the shore of the lake of the same name, and nearby Esquel and Trevelin as service towns. Its appeal centred on nature: the boat trip to the Alerzal Milenario, the turquoise lakes, trekking, fishing and contact with an exceptionally well-preserved forest.
International recognition came in 2017, when UNESCO declared Los Alerces National Park a World Heritage Site, on the strength of the exceptional value of its temperate Patagonian forests and its ancient alerces, considered an outstanding example of these ecosystems and their biodiversity. That distinction reinforced the park's protection and consolidated its standing as one of Argentina's great natural sanctuaries, where time is measured in millennia in the shade of the alerces.
Long before it was created as a park, the Los Alerces region was inhabited by Indigenous peoples who moved through the forests, lakes and valleys of the Chubut cordillera. The Tehuelche and, later, the Mapuche-Tehuelche left their mark on the territory, drawing on the resources of the forest and the water and keeping a deep relationship with the landscape. The alerce's own name, 'lahuán', comes from the language of these peoples.
On some overhangs and rock walls in the park, rock paintings survive as testimony to that ancient human presence. These works, along with the Indigenous names of lakes and rivers (Futalaufquen, Menéndez, Rivadavia, Arrayanes), are a reminder that the ancient forest was also the setting for the lives of communities who inhabited it for generations.
The Conquest of the Desert and the settlement that followed transformed the region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the arrival of criollo settlers and, notably, of Welsh colonists who established themselves in the Chubut valley and in Trevelin, whose cultural legacy — the tea houses, the torta negra, the place names — lives on in the area. That range of historical layers, Indigenous, criollo and Welsh, is part of the identity of the area around the park.
Today, backed by its World Heritage status, Los Alerces National Park is a benchmark for the conservation of Patagonia's temperate forests. Management by the National Parks Administration combines strict protection of the ancient alerce stands, scientific research on the longevity and ecology of the alerce, and the development of low-impact nature tourism. The study of 'El Abuelo' and other specimens yields valuable data on past climate and forest dynamics.
The park faces significant environmental challenges: the risk of forest fires, made worse by droughts and climate change — the great fire of the summer of 2024 tore through thousands of hectares of forest in the northern sector, one of the worst in the park's history; the presence of invasive species; and the need to balance the flow of tourists with the fragility of these environments, especially access to the Alerzal Milenario, which is regulated and capped.
For the visitor, Los Alerces offers a different experience from Patagonia's more crowded destinations: pristine nature, silence, turquoise water and the chance to stand in front of a tree that watched entire civilizations be born. Conserving this heritage — ancient and irreplaceable — depends on conscious tourism and on the continuity of protection policies, so that the alerce stands keep growing, very slowly and forever, over the millennia to come.