🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Los Glaciares National Park is one of Argentina's great natural icons and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in the southwest of Santa Cruz province, in the southern Andes. It protects a vast territory of ice fields, glaciers, mountains, lakes and Andean-Patagonian forests. It's one of the few places in the world where you can see a moving glacier up close, and it holds two of the country's biggest tourist draws: the Perito Moreno glacier and the Cerro Fitz Roy (Chaltén) massif.
The park is organized around two zones and their respective base towns. To the south, El Calafate is the gateway to the Perito Moreno glacier, the imposing ice front some 60 metres high whose calving is an unforgettable spectacle, and to other glaciers on Lago Argentino. To the north, El Chaltén — the 'national trekking capital' — is the base for walking the Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre massif, with its granite spires, lagoons and glaciers, on some of the best mountain trails on the planet.
This guide covers the essentials of Los Glaciares National Park with a practical eye: the Perito Moreno glacier and the walkways, the boat safaris and the mini-trek on the ice, the Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre treks from El Chaltén, the boat trips to the glaciers of Lago Argentino, how to organize the visit between the two towns and when to go. It's an unmissable Patagonian destination, a byword for ice, mountains and adventure.
Los Glaciares National Park was created in 1937 to protect the set of glaciers and mountains of the southern Patagonian ice field on Argentine soil, including the famous Perito Moreno glacier. In 1981 it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its exceptional natural value. Its name refers to the many glaciers that come down from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field.
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.
First you hear a dry crack, like a distant gunshot. Then a roar that bounces off the mountains, and a wall of ice sixty metres high — the equivalent of a twenty-storey building — collapses into Lago Argentino, throwing up a turquoise wave. Anyone who has stood on the Perito Moreno walkways knows that moment doesn't leave you. Behind that spectacle is a colossal machine: the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the largest expanse of continental ice in the southern hemisphere outside Antarctica, some 350 kilometres long and shared between Argentina and Chile. From that immense reservoir descend the park's 47 major glaciers, which feed lakes of a characteristic milky-turquoise colour, the result of 'glacial flour': the extremely fine sediment the ice scrapes off the rock as it advances.
This landscape is the legacy of the great glaciations: during the ice ages, glaciers shaped the valleys, carved out the basins of the lakes — such as Lago Argentino, the largest in Argentina at some 1,560 km², and Lago Viedma — and sculpted the granite mountains that astonish visitors today. What's extraordinary about Los Glaciares is that the process is still alive and visible: the glaciers keep advancing, retreating, cracking and calving icebergs, a geological spectacle in real time.
Among the glaciers, the standouts are the Perito Moreno — famous for its active front and its ruptures — the Upsala, one of the largest in South America at some 765 km², and the Spegazzini, whose front reaches 135 metres in height, both reachable by boat. Above the ice and the rock rise the mythical mountains of the Fitz Roy massif and Cerro Torre, with their granite spires that are a legendary challenge for climbers worldwide. Ice, water and stone compose here one of the most spectacular landscapes on Earth.
Long before the walkways and the catamarans, these lands were the territory of the Aónikenk, the southern Tehuelche, nomadic hunters who moved across the steppe following guanacos and rheas. They called the peak that almost always appears crowned with cloud 'Chaltén' — usually translated as 'smoking mountain' — and considered it a sacred mountain. Their mark remains in the names, in the overhangs with rock paintings around the region and in the place names Argentina recovered more than a century later.
European and criollo exploration of the area came late and in trickles. In 1782, the Spanish sailor Antonio de Viedma reached the great northern lake that today carries his surname, among the first to look out over the southern ice. Almost a century later, in February 1877, the explorer and naturalist Francisco Pascasio Moreno went up the Río Santa Cruz, reached the enormous lake he named 'Argentino' and, on 2 March that year, gave the Tehuelche sacred peak the name Fitz Roy, in tribute to the captain of HMS Beagle who had explored the Patagonian coast with Darwin. Curiously, the park's most famous glacier wasn't sighted by Moreno: in 1879 the Chilean sailor Juan Tomás Rogers spotted it and called it 'Francisco Gormaz'; only years later was it renamed 'Perito Moreno' in honour of the Argentine explorer, and there's no record of Moreno ever having set foot on the ice that now carries his name.
In the early 20th century came the scholars and the pioneers: the geologist Rodolfo Hauthal surveyed the glaciers of Lago Argentino, and the Salesian priest Alberto María De Agostini — a tireless explorer and photographer — travelled and portrayed the Fitz Roy massif and Cerro Torre, leaving images and maps that revealed these mountains to the world. Their names are engraved on the park's map: the De Agostini camp, the base for the trek to Laguna Torre, recalls one of them.
Los Glaciares National Park was created in 1937, in the founding stage of the Argentine national park system, with the aim of protecting the set of glaciers, mountains, lakes and Andean-Patagonian forests of southwestern Santa Cruz. Creating the park sought both to conserve this exceptional natural heritage and to assert Argentine presence and sovereignty in a southern border region, in keeping with the spirit of the national parks of the era, whose seed had been planted by Francisco P. Moreno himself when in 1903 he donated the land that gave rise to the country's first national park.
For decades, access to the park was difficult and tourism limited, given the remoteness and the harsh conditions of southern Patagonia: reaching the glacier from the small settlement of El Calafate was an expedition in itself. Over time, better communications, the construction of El Calafate's international airport (opened in 2000, which multiplied visitor numbers) and, later, the rise of El Chaltén as the trekking capital turned Los Glaciares into one of the most important tourist destinations in Argentina and South America.
International recognition came in 1981, when UNESCO declared Los Glaciares National Park a World Heritage Site, on the strength of its exceptional natural beauty and its glaciological interest: it's one of the most accessible ice laboratories on the planet. That distinction consolidated its worldwide standing and reinforced its protection. Today the park — some 726,000 hectares — combines the conservation of a unique natural heritage with nature and mountain tourism on an international scale, organized around its two great poles: the Perito Moreno glacier, in the south, and the Fitz Roy massif, in the north.
The park's mountains have a history and a mythology of their own. Fitz Roy, at 3,405 metres, isn't tall by Himalayan standards, but its vertical granite walls and the ferocious Patagonian weather made it one of the most feared summits in the world: it was only climbed for the first time in 1952, by the Frenchmen Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone, and for decades whole years went by without anyone repeating the feat. Terray, who had conquered Annapurna, said Fitz Roy was the hardest climb of his life.
Neighbouring Cerro Torre, a granite spire of 3,102 metres crowned by ice mushrooms, is at the centre of the most famous controversy in climbing history. In 1959, the Italian Cesare Maestri claimed to have reached the summit with the Austrian Toni Egger, who died on the descent, swept away by an avalanche — and with him the camera that would have proved the ascent. The inconsistencies in Maestri's account led the climbing community to eventually dismiss his claim; in 1970, Maestri returned with a compressed-air drill and hammered hundreds of bolts into the wall (the controversial 'compressor route'), without reaching the summit of the final mushroom either. The first recognized ascent came in 1974, with the Italian expedition of the 'Ragni di Lecco' led by Casimiro Ferrari. Even today, every ascent of the Torre makes news in the mountaineering world.
El Chaltén, by contrast, is a very young town: it was founded by the Argentine state on 12 October 1985, in the context of the border dispute with Chile over the Lago del Desierto area, and grew from a handful of houses into the 'national trekking capital'. The trails to Laguna de los Tres and Laguna Torre, open to walkers from all over the world, start from its streets. So the mountains that were once the challenge of a few elite climbers are today also the setting for one of the most sought-after trekking experiences on the planet.
The park's most celebrated glacier owes its name to Francisco Pascasio Moreno (1852-1919), the Argentine explorer, naturalist and expert surveyor who travelled southern Patagonia in the late 19th century and played a decisive role in drawing the border with Chile. The phenomenon that made it world famous is unique: when its front advances until it touches the Magallanes peninsula, the ice forms a natural dam that holds back the Brazo Rico of Lago Argentino; the water builds up many metres above its normal level, until the pressure bores a tunnel through the ice whose arch collapses in a deafening rupture. The first documented rupture dates from 1917, and through the 20th century the cycle repeated irregularly. The 1988 rupture was the first broadcast widely on television, and those of 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2016 and March 2018 — the last one so far — drew crowds who camped in front of the walkways to hear the final crash.
For decades, the Perito Moreno was presented as the great exception: while almost every glacier on the planet was retreating because of global warming, its front seemed to be in balance, advancing and calving ice at a rate that cancelled out. That story changed recently. Glaciological studies based on satellite series detected a sustained retreat from 2016, which then accelerated dramatically: in 2025 alone the front pulled back some 385 metres in the Lago Argentino sector, the largest loss in the whole measured series, and over the 2025-2026 summer the glacier lost around 80 hectares of surface in barely three months. Specialists warn that, if the trend continues, the glacier could retreat several kilometres before finding a new point of balance further up the valley. The 'glacier that didn't retreat' has entered a new era, and seeing it today carries something of a historical record.
None of this makes the visit any less spectacular: the front keeps its 60 metres of height and some 5 kilometres of width, and the calving still thunders daily. The building of the walkways in front of the glacier, the opening of El Calafate airport and the development of the mini-trek on the ice turned Los Glaciares into one of the main nature destinations in South America: hundreds of thousands of visitors a year walk the walkways, sail among icebergs and walk with crampons on ice that is centuries old. Few travel experiences teach so much, and so plainly, about the past and the future of the planet.