🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Perito Moreno is a town on the Santa Cruz steppe, in the northwest of the province, on the legendary National Route 40. It should not be confused with the famous glacier of the same name (which is much further south, near El Calafate): this is a quiet service town, important as a logistical base for exploring northwestern Santa Cruz.
Its main draw is serving as the starting point for the Cueva de las Manos, a World Heritage site in the Cañadón del Río Pinturas. It is also a base for visiting the nearby Parque Nacional Patagonia (still being set up, taking in the Cueva de las Manos provincial reserve and the Lago Buenos Aires area) and for connecting with Los Antiguos, on the shore of the second largest lake in South America.
This guide covers what the town is like, how to use it as a base for trips in the area, how to get there (it is an important junction of RN40 and RN43 towards Chile) and practical advice on fuel, accommodation, prices and seasons in a remote corner of deep Patagonia.
The town was born in the early 20th century, tied to the ranching settlement of the Santa Cruz steppe and the wool trade around Lago Buenos Aires. It is named after the celebrated Perito Francisco P. Moreno, explorer, naturalist and a key figure in defining the border with Chile. Its street grid took shape as a service stop on what would become National Route 40, and from the mid-20th century it established itself as a communications hub and the gateway to the Cueva de las Manos, the extraordinary rock art site in the Cañadón del Río Pinturas declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1999. Today it is a service centre on RN40, the base for tourism in northwestern Santa Cruz and part of the region of the recently created Parque Nacional Patagonia. 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.
Some 120 km from this quiet town on Route 40, in a hidden canyon out on the steppe, hundreds of human hands were printed on the rock more than 9,000 years ago: not drawn but blown, with pigment sprayed from the mouth around a hand pressed against the stone, a gesture repeated generation after generation for millennia. It is one of the oldest images of art anywhere in the Americas, and the reason most travellers pass through Perito Moreno. But the town, far from being only a service stop, has its own history of settlement, wool and roads worth knowing.
The town of Perito Moreno appeared in the first decades of the 20th century, as part of the settlement of the Santa Cruz steppe. After the military campaigns of the late 19th century that brought Patagonia into the Argentine state, vast stretches of land were given over to extensive sheep farming, on a model of large wool estancias that defined the economy and the settlement of the whole region.
In that context, the northwest of Santa Cruz, around Lago Buenos Aires and the Cañadón del Río Pinturas, began to fill with estancias devoted to wool, Patagonia's main export at the time. The town of Perito Moreno was born as a service and collection point for that trade: a place to stock up, trade wool and connect the scattered estancias of the steppe.
The town's name honours Francisco Pascasio Moreno, the celebrated 'Perito Moreno', explorer, naturalist and a key figure in the scientific exploration of Patagonia and in defending Argentine interests in the border demarcation with Chile. His name, tied to the feat of exploring and mapping these southern lands, is attached both to this town and to the country's most famous glacier, both in Santa Cruz province.
As National Route 40 established itself as Argentina's great north-south axis, running the length of the country alongside the Andes, Perito Moreno gained a new importance. In a region of enormous distances and scarce services, the town became a nerve centre: petrol station, accommodation, food and rest for anyone driving one of the loneliest and most beautiful stretches of RN40, deep in the Patagonian steppe.
Perito Moreno is also the junction where RN40 meets RN43, which runs west to Los Antiguos — on the shore of Lago Buenos Aires, the second largest lake in South America — and to the border crossing into Chile Chico. That strategic position reinforced its role as a service town and regional link.
With UNESCO's recognition of the Cueva de las Manos as a World Heritage site in 1999, the town gained a clear tourist profile: it became the main base for reaching one of the most important rock art sites in the Americas. Today the local economy combines traditional sheep farming, Route 40 services and a growing tourism whose great draws are the Cueva de las Manos and the nature of the steppe.
Long before the town existed, the northwest of Santa Cruz was inhabited for millennia by hunter-gatherer peoples. In the nearby Cañadón del Río Pinturas, the rock shelters and caves preserve one of the oldest and most remarkable records of human settlement in Patagonia: the Cueva de las Manos, whose oldest paintings are dated to around 9,300 years old, with sequences of occupation stretching across thousands of years.
The famous hands in negative — silhouettes stencilled by blowing pigment around a hand pressed to the rock — sit alongside guanaco hunting scenes, animal figures and abstract geometric motifs. These works were made by the ancestors of the Tehuelche (Aonikenk), the peoples who lived on the steppe at the time of European contact, organised in nomadic bands that followed the guanacos across immense territories.
The systematic study of the site is largely owed to the archaeologist Carlos Gradin, who led research on the Río Pinturas through the 1960s to the 1980s and established the cultural and chronological sequence of the paintings. His work was key to the international recognition of the place, declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1999. The town's museum now bears his name.
For much of the 20th century, Perito Moreno was a town of 'deep Patagonia', marked by isolation, long distances and dependence on sheep farming. The crisis in the wool sector towards the end of the century, worsened by falling international prices and by the ash from volcanic eruptions such as Hudson (1991), hit the region and the surrounding estancias hard.
A growing appreciation of the natural and cultural heritage opened a new chapter. UNESCO's recognition of the Cueva de las Manos, the growth of tourism along the legendary Route 40 and the closeness of Los Antiguos — with its fruit-growing microclimate and its national cherry festival — gradually shifted the local economy towards services and nature tourism.
A recent milestone was the creation of Parque Nacional Patagonia (not to be confused with Parque Nacional Perito Moreno, further south), a protected area covering the Lago Buenos Aires plateau, the Cañadón del Río Pinturas and the Cueva de las Manos provincial reserve, the result of donated land and the work of conservation organisations. That process cemented Perito Moreno as the gateway to a nature and archaeology destination of worldwide significance, in one of the most remote and fascinating corners of Argentine Patagonia.
Walking today across Perito Moreno's Plaza San Martín means feeling the pulse of a small town that lives, to a large extent, off passing travellers. The inns, the YPF station — one of the few for hundreds of kilometres around — and the restaurants serving Patagonian lamb and home-made milanesas depend as much on locals as on the backpackers and motorcyclists driving RN40 end to end, many of them stopping here purely for the Cueva de las Manos.
That mix of ranching town and tourist hub sits alongside an identity strongly marked by geographical isolation. Perito Moreno is hundreds of kilometres from the big Patagonian cities, in a region where wind and plateau dominate the landscape almost all year. The older residents still remember the hardest years of the wool crisis of the nineties, when the fall in international wool prices, on top of the ash from the Hudson volcano that covered entire fields in 1991, put much of the area's estancias in jeopardy.
The creation of Parque Nacional Patagonia in recent years, together with the steady growth of tourism towards the Cueva de las Manos and Los Antiguos, gave the town an economic way out that no longer depended on wool alone. Today, when a traveller reaches Perito Moreno with an almost empty tank after hundreds of kilometres of steppe, they find not only fuel and a bed but the gateway to one of the most singular archaeological and natural treasures in all of South America.