🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Perito Moreno National Park is one of the most remote, rugged and least visited parks in Argentina, in the northwest of Santa Cruz province, deep in the southern Patagonian range and steppe. Don't confuse it with the famous Perito Moreno glacier (which is in Los Glaciares National Park, much further south): this park protects a different landscape, of turquoise glacial lakes, mountain chains, steppe, forest and remarkable Patagonian wildlife, in near-absolute solitude.
It's a destination for independent travelers, lovers of wild nature and isolation, since there are almost no tourist services inside the park: you have to arrive with your own vehicle, fuel, food and gear, and be self-sufficient. In return it offers an experience of pristine nature rarely matched: lakes such as the Belgrano, the Burmeister and the Azara, mountains, hanging glaciers, guanacos, condors, huemul deer (endangered) and an overwhelming silence. It also holds rock art sites and the Estancia La Oriental, inside the park itself.
This guide covers the essentials of Perito Moreno National Park with a practical eye: its lakes and landscapes, the treks and wildlife watching, the logistics you can't do without, the free access, how to get there along Route 40 and what precautions to take. It's a destination only for those after the most authentic and solitary Patagonia, far from any mass circuit, in one of the country's most untouched corners.
Perito Moreno National Park was created in 1937, one of the first national parks in Patagonia, to protect a representative stretch of the range and steppe of northwestern Santa Cruz, with its glacial lakes, its flora and its wildlife. It carries the name of Francisco Pascasio Moreno, the 'Perito Moreno', explorer and forerunner of Argentina's national parks. The full story is on our history page.
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.
There are places in Patagonia where the silence is so complete you can hear your own pulse. Northwestern Santa Cruz, where Perito Moreno National Park now lies, is one of them: a territory of turquoise lakes, snowy ranges and endless steppe that receives fewer visitors in a year than the glacier of the same name does in a single day. And yet this 'end of the world' was inhabited for thousands of years: hunter-gatherer peoples moved across the steppe and the mountains following the guanaco herds, and left their mark on overhangs and rock walls in the form of rock art: hand stencils, guanaco figures and geometric motifs painted in ochre.
These rock art sites, spread across the whole region, are testimony to one of the longest human occupations in Patagonia. The most famous and oldest example is the Cueva de las Manos, in the Río Pinturas canyon, not far from the park, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with paintings up to 9,000 years old. Inside and around Perito Moreno National Park there are other, less known sites from the same tradition, such as the overhangs around Lago Burmeister, which the rangers point out to interested visitors.
The Tehuelche (Aónikenk) were the last heirs of that very long history. The arrival of the Argentine state and of the ranchers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries transformed the region deeply: the establishment of large sheep estancias and the advance of the frontier marked the end of the traditional Tehuelche way of life, in a process that came at an enormous cost to the Indigenous peoples of southern Patagonia.
Perito Moreno National Park was created in 1937, in the founding years of the Argentine national park system — the same batch as Los Glaciares and Lanín — which makes it one of the oldest parks in Patagonia. Its creation answered the double impulse of the era: protecting representative areas of Patagonian nature and, at the same time, asserting the state's presence in remote border regions of the country's south, following the vision Francisco P. Moreno had sown with his 1903 donation.
The park protects a stretch of northwestern Santa Cruz province where the Andes meet the Patagonian steppe: a mosaic of glacial lakes — the Belgrano, with its emblematic peninsula; the Burmeister; the Azara and several more — mountain chains, hanging glaciers, lenga and ñire forests, and vast stretches of steppe. It's a transition environment of great ecological and scenic value, home to emblematic wildlife such as the huemul, the condor and the guanaco. A hydrographic curiosity sets it apart: its lakes drain to both sides, some to the Atlantic and others to the Pacific, because the continental divide runs through the park.
Unlike other Patagonian parks that developed into large tourist centres, Perito Moreno has kept a remote, rugged and little-visited character to this day, with no significant tourist infrastructure inside its boundaries. That condition, far from being a shortcoming, is part of its value: it offers an experience of pristine nature and near-absolute solitude, a wild Patagonia that is ever harder to find.
The park carries the name of Francisco Pascasio Moreno (1852-1919), known as the 'Perito Moreno', one of the great Argentine explorers and naturalists, a central figure in the knowledge, exploration and defence of Argentine sovereignty in Patagonia. Moreno travelled and studied vast regions of the south, acted as the expert surveyor in the boundary question with Chile and was the forerunner of the national park idea: the land he donated in 1903 gave rise, in time, to the country's first national park (Nahuel Huapi). Because of that founding role, several Patagonian sites carry his name.
Hence a very common confusion: Perito Moreno National Park is not where the famous Perito Moreno glacier is. The glacier — one of Argentina's tourist icons — is in Los Glaciares National Park, some 400 kilometres further south, near El Calafate. Perito Moreno National Park, by contrast, is in northwestern Santa Cruz and protects a landscape of lakes, mountains and steppe, with no emblematic glacier as its central draw. Adding to the confusion, there's also the town of Perito Moreno, a settlement in Santa Cruz on Route 40, near the Cueva de las Manos, which has no glacier either.
That shared name means many travelers reach the park expecting to see the glacier and find a completely different destination: more remote, more rugged and without services, but with a wild beauty of its own. Knowing the difference is key to planning the visit properly. The shared name is a tribute to the same great explorer, spread across very different corners of Patagonia.
To the northwest of the park rises Monte San Lorenzo, at 3,706 metres: the second-highest summit in southern Patagonia after San Valentín, a colossus of ice and granite straddling the Argentine-Chilean border. Its first ascent is one of the great stories of American mountaineering: it was achieved in December 1943 by the Salesian priest and explorer Alberto María De Agostini — the same man who had revealed Fitz Roy to the world — who reached the summit at 60 alongside the guides Alex Hemmi and Heriberto Schmoll. San Lorenzo's walls still draw expedition climbers, and its views crown the park's horizon on clear days.
Right at the foot of San Lorenzo lay the El Rincón estancia, 15,175 hectares of valleys and steppe that the American businessman and conservationist Douglas Tompkins — founder of The North Face and creator of parks in Chile and Argentina — bought and donated to the Argentine state in 2013 to enlarge Perito Moreno National Park. Decree 641/2016 brought it in as the El Rincón Wild Nature Reserve, in a process of full integration into the park. It was one of the many Tompkins family donations that transformed conservation in Patagonia.
With that enlargement, the protected area exceeds 126,800 hectares. The story repeats itself with curious symmetry: a park born of the vision of an Argentine naturalist who donated his land in 1903 grew, a century later, thanks to a foreign philanthropist who did exactly the same thing.
At some 126,830 hectares (counting the El Rincón reserve area), Perito Moreno National Park protects one of the best-preserved environments in southern Patagonia. Its isolation and its low visitor numbers — it receives just a few thousand tourists a year, against the hundreds of thousands of other Patagonian parks — make it a key refuge for threatened species, especially the huemul, the endangered Andean deer whose world population is estimated at little more than a thousand individuals and which finds here one of its last sanctuaries.
The park is also a site of great scientific interest. Important palaeontological and archaeological finds have been made in the area that help reconstruct the natural and human history of Patagonia, and the transition between range and steppe, its lakes and its wetlands are the subject of studies on climate, glaciology and biodiversity. The annual huemul censuses the rangers have carried out for decades are among the most valuable records of the species.
Today, the park's main challenges are conserving it against pressure from livestock on neighbouring estancias, invasive species and climate change, as well as the delicate balance between keeping its pristine character and allowing responsible, low-impact nature tourism. The Estancia La Oriental, integrated into the park as a service base, and the work of the rangers make it possible to visit one of the most untouched and silent corners in all of Argentina in an orderly way.