🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Puerto Deseado is a port town in northern Santa Cruz, set on the Ría Deseado, an arm of the sea of exceptional natural value. It is one of the best wildlife destinations on the Patagonian coast, famous for its penguin colonies, its Commerson's dolphins (black-and-white toninas overas), sea lions and rich seabird life.
The Ría Deseado, an old river valley invaded by the sea, is a nature reserve where boat trips run to watch wildlife in its own setting. Nearby is the Isla Pingüino provincial reserve, home to the only colony of rockhopper penguins reachable on the Argentine mainland, and the Isla Pingüino Interjurisdictional Marine Park. The town also has a rich history tied to navigators such as Magellan and Darwin.
This guide covers the essentials with real, verified prices: the boat trips along the ría, Isla Pingüino and its rockhopper penguins, the marine wildlife (Commerson's dolphins, sea lions, birds), the history of the explorers, how to get there (it is somewhat out of the way) and practical advice on seasons and excursions.
The Ría Deseado was sighted by European navigators from the 16th century; it took its name from the English privateer Thomas Cavendish, after his ship 'Desire'. Magellan and later Darwin (on the Beagle) put in here. The town took shape with the railway and fishing in the early 20th century, and today it combines its fishing port with first-rate nature tourism. 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.
On 4 February 1982, a group of teenagers from a Patagonian fishing town found on the bed of their estuary what archaeologists around the world had spent decades dreaming of: an 18th-century English warship, sunk in 1770 and forgotten for 212 years, with its tableware, its bottles and even its hourglasses intact in the mud. That town is Puerto Deseado, and the discovery of the Swift is only the most novel-like chapter of a story that takes in Magellan, an English privateer who gave the place its name, Charles Darwin and a railway that never reached its destination. But to tell it from the beginning you have to go much further back: thousands of years before any map.
Long before the European navigators arrived, the coast of what is now Santa Cruz was inhabited by hunter-gatherer peoples. The Tehuelche (Aonikenk in the south, and related groups in northern Santa Cruz) roamed these plateaus and shores following the guanaco and the rhea, and lived off the resources of the sea and the estuaries. The Deseado region, with its deep estuary and abundant wildlife, was part of that vast territory of seasonal movement.
The archaeological traces of central and northern Santa Cruz — rock shelters with paintings, stone-knapping sites and the remains of camps — attest to a human occupation going back several thousand years. These groups developed a deep knowledge of the harsh climate, the Patagonian wind and the cycles of the wildlife, long before any European map recorded the existence of the estuary.
Contact with Europeans from the 16th century, and later the effective occupation by the Argentine state in the 19th, radically transformed that world. The so-called Conquest of the Desert and the spread of sheep farming drastically reduced the indigenous populations, whose legacy nonetheless persists in the place names, in the regional rock art and in the memory of the land.
The Ría Deseado ranks among the places most visited by European navigators during the great age of exploring the far south of the Americas. In 1520, Ferdinand Magellan's expedition, on its famous voyage in search of the interoceanic passage, entered the estuary driven in by a storm; the navigator named it, tellingly, 'Bahía de los Trabajos Forzosos', the bay of forced labours, for the punishing work the bad weather cost him. The estuary, deep and sheltered, offered a natural anchorage on an inhospitable, windy coast, a rarity on a shoreline of open beaches and wind-battered cliffs.
The definitive name came on 16 December 1586, when the English privateer Thomas Cavendish entered the estuary with his three ships — the Desire, the Hugh Gallant and the Content — and called the anchorage Port Desire, after his flagship. From that ship — 'Deseo' in Spanish — came the place name the site still bears: the Ría Deseado and, later, the town of Puerto Deseado. So the name keeps the memory of those voyages of exploration and privateering in the southern seas, in the middle of the European powers' struggle over the routes to the Pacific.
Centuries later, in 1833, another illustrious visitor explored the estuary: the young naturalist Charles Darwin, aboard HMS Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy, on the voyage that would give rise to his revolutionary theories of evolution. Darwin studied the geology, flora and fauna of the area, fascinated by its austere nature and by the abundance of marine life. That rich history of navigators and naturalists is part of the heritage Puerto Deseado now claims, and its best-known boat company bears, not by chance, the name of Darwin.
On 13 March 1770, the British warship HMS Swift, stationed in the Malvinas, sought shelter in the estuary during a reconnaissance mission and struck a submerged rock. The ship sank within hours; 3 of its 91 crew died, and the survivors — among them Lieutenant Erasmus Gower, who years later would become an admiral — managed to reach the shore and survive the Patagonian exposure until they were rescued by another ship sent from the islands. Then came oblivion: for more than two centuries, nobody in Puerto Deseado knew they had an 18th-century warship sleeping on the bed of their estuary.
The story woke up in 1975, when Patrick Rodney Gower, a descendant of that surviving officer, came to town with the family documents on the wreck. The detail circulated until, in 1980, a maths teacher, Ricardo Locarnini, mentioned it to his pupils. A group of teenagers — among them Marcelo Rosas and Mario Brozoski — took up the challenge seriously: they formed a 'Subcommittee for the Search and Recovery of the Corvette Swift', learned to dive, studied old charts and combed the estuary. On 4 February 1982 they found it, metres from the shore, covered by the mud that had preserved it astonishingly well.
The find founded Argentine underwater archaeology. The more than 600 pieces recovered over successive campaigns — porcelain, glass bottles, footwear, navigation instruments and even the bones of one of the crew, buried with honours in the local cemetery — are displayed today at the Museo Municipal Mario Brozoski, named after one of those young divers, who died shortly after the discovery. It is the country's only museum of underwater archaeology and conservation, and the reason Puerto Deseado appears in archaeology textbooks across the continent.
Through much of the colonial and independent era, the Ría Deseado remained an occasional anchorage, with no permanent population. Only in the 19th century, as the Argentine state advanced into Patagonia and needed to assert its sovereignty against other powers, did the place begin to take on strategic importance. The Santa Cruz coast saw attempts at colonisation, the setting up of coastguard posts and official exploring parties.
The official founding of the town is dated to 15 July 1884, when the settlement was established as part of the organisation of what was then the National Territory of Santa Cruz. Sheep farming, which spread across Patagonia in the late 19th century, gave the region its first economic push, with large estancias producing wool for export.
The estuary, navigable and sheltered, made the place a natural loading point for regional production. That port role would prove decisive a few decades later, when the railway sought to connect the interior of Santa Cruz with an outlet to the sea through Puerto Deseado.
The modern town of Puerto Deseado took shape in the early 20th century, driven by the development of the port, by fishing and by the arrival of the railway. From 1909 a branch line was built to connect Puerto Deseado with the interior of Santa Cruz, towards the Las Heras area and the mountains, seeking an outlet for regional production — wool, minerals and livestock — through the estuary. The scheme was ambitious and never reached its original destination, but it left a deep mark on the town.
From that era there remain historic buildings of considerable value, such as the old railway station, the Historic Carriage and English-style constructions linked to the railway and port activity. These sites are now part of the heritage the town shows visitors and a record of a development project that shaped northern Santa Cruz.
Fishing became central to the local economy, drawing on the richness of the Patagonian sea: prawns, hake, squid and other species. The port and the fishing supported the population and forged the hard-working, seafaring character of a town set on one of the richest coastlines for wildlife in all of Patagonia.
In recent decades, the exceptional natural setting of Puerto Deseado has turned the town into a first-rate nature tourism destination. The Ría Deseado was declared a Provincial Nature Reserve in 1977, protecting a unique ecosystem: a river valley invaded by the sea that reaches some 40 kilometres inland, home to Commerson's dolphins, five species of cormorant, sea lions and a rich birdlife.
The creation of the Patagonia Austral Coastal Marine Interjurisdictional Park and, especially, of the Isla Pingüino Interjurisdictional Marine Park — which protects the Isla Pingüino provincial reserve — cemented the conservation vocation of the area. The island holds the only colony of rockhopper penguins reachable on the Argentine mainland, along with Magellanic penguins, sea lions and elephant seals and a historic lighthouse.
Today Puerto Deseado combines its historic fishing port with a tourism that highlights the marine wildlife and the legacy of the explorers. The boat trips along the estuary, the excursions to Isla Pingüino and Cabo Blanco, and the historic sites in town mean that the port 'desired' by the navigators of the 16th century still draws travellers, now in search of nature and adventure at the end of the world.