🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
In southwestern Neuquén, spread along the eastern tip of Lago Lácar and ringed by forested hills, San Martín de los Andes is one of the prettiest mountain towns in Argentine Patagonia. Its center, with stone and timber houses, flower gardens and a distinctly alpine look protected by building code, slopes gently down to the lakefront, where clear water mirrors the peaks. It's both a quiet retreat and an unbeatable base for exploring the lake district.
The town began as a military outpost in 1898, in the middle of the border dispute with Chile, and over time became a top-tier destination. Today it has it all: Cerro Chapelco for skiing in winter and for hiking and big views the rest of the year; Lago Lácar for boat trips, kayaking and beaches like Quila Quina and Catritre; and the imposing Parque Nacional Lanín, dominated by the perfect cone of the Lanín volcano, with its araucaria forests, lakes and trails.
San Martín de los Andes is also the northern end of the legendary Ruta de los Siete Lagos, the scenic stretch of Ruta Nacional 40 that links it with Villa La Angostura through forests and sheets of water. Nature, mountains, lakes, Patagonian food and a charming town center make it one of the great classics of Argentine travel and an ideal starting point for touring the whole Neuquén cordillera.
Long before the town existed, the Lago Lácar region and the foot of the Lanín volcano were inhabited by indigenous peoples, above all Mapuche communities who occupied these mountain territories as part of the araucanización process between the 18th and 19th centuries, joining earlier populations. Local place names — Lácar, Lolog, Quila Quina, Chapelco — preserve that deep imprint. San Martín de los Andes was officially founded on 4 February 1898 by Colonel Celestino Pérez, on orders from the army chief, General Rudecindo Roca, as a military outpost meant to assert Argentine sovereignty in an area disputed with Chile: the Chilean authorities argued that, since Lago Lácar drains towards the Pacific, the area should belong to them. The border question was later settled by arbitration. In its first decades the town's economy rested on logging and livestock. A turning point came with the creation of Parque Nacional Lanín in 1937, which protected the forests, the lakes and the volcano and put the area on the map as a tourist destination. Since then, boosted by skiing at Cerro Chapelco and by the Ruta de los Siete Lagos, San Martín de los Andes has become one of the most important tourism centers in Patagonia, while keeping the scale of a mountain town and the carefully guarded architecture that is part of its identity. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The province of volcanoes, lakes and the araucaria: Pehuenche and Mapuche land in northern Patagonia, world capital of the giant dinosaurs, heart of the Vaca Muerta shale and gateway to the Route of the Seven Lakes.
Read the history of Neuquén →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Why does a lake that rises in Argentina end up draining into the Pacific Ocean, on the other side of the continent? That geographical oddity of Lago Lácar — which drains towards Chile through the Hua Hum river — isn't just a textbook curiosity: it was, as we'll see, the origin of a border dispute that ended up giving the town of San Martín de los Andes its name and its reason to exist. But long before that dispute, and long before a single street was laid out, this basin was already a lived-in territory, crossed and contested by the peoples who inhabited it.
The Lago Lácar region, at the foot of the Lanín volcano, was home for centuries to communities that lived by hunting, fishing and gathering in a territory of Andean-Patagonian forest, glacial lakes and mountains under snow for much of the year. The lakes and the mountain passes — the Hua Hum pass among them — weren't barriers but lines of communication: trade routes for goods, people and news between the two sides of the Andes, long before there was any border drawn on a map.
Between the 18th and 19th centuries came the process historians call araucanización: Mapuche communities — originally from the other side of the mountains, in what is now Chile — gradually crossed over and settled in these territories, merging with the peoples already there (such as the Pehuenche, gatherers of the araucaria pine nut) and spreading their language, Mapudungun, and their culture across the whole Andean-Patagonian region. The mark of that indigenous presence runs deep and is still strongly felt in the area, well beyond tourist folklore.
Local place names preserve that legacy in every word on the road signs today: Lácar ('place of dryness or disappearance', by some readings), Lolog, Quila Quina ('place of canes and thorns'), Chapelco, and Lanín itself, a word said to refer to something 'dying' or 'dead' in reference to the extinct volcano. Mapuche communities such as the Curruhuinca still live in the area — at Quila Quina and around the town, for example, on land legally recognized after long struggles for communal title — keeping their identity, their language and their practices alive, and today sharing part of that culture, through community tourism and craft markets, with visitors who arrived expecting only scenery.
San Martín de los Andes was officially founded on 4 February 1898 by Colonel Celestino Pérez, on orders from the army chief, General Rudecindo Roca. Unlike many towns that grew out of trade or farming settlement, its origin was strictly military and strategic: the point was to set up an army post that would assert Argentine presence and sovereignty in an area then in the middle of a border dispute with Chile.
The sticking point was geography. For much of the 19th century the criterion for fixing the border was the watershed divide: land whose rivers drained towards the Pacific would tend to fall on the Chilean side, and land draining towards the Atlantic on the Argentine side. The problem is that Lago Lácar drains towards the Pacific, so the Chilean authorities argued that the San Martín de los Andes area should be theirs. Founding an Argentine settlement there was, therefore, a way of staking sovereignty over claimed territory.
The dispute was eventually settled through diplomacy and the international arbitration of the early 20th century, which combined the highest-peaks criterion with the watershed one and left the Lago Lácar region on the Argentine side. The town born as a military outpost was thus definitively folded into Argentine Patagonia, where it would grow over time.
After the founding, San Martín de los Andes grew slowly as an isolated mountain town, with harsh winters and difficult communications. The soldiers and first settlers were joined by criollo families, Mapuche settlers and European immigrants who put down roots in the Lago Lácar valley and the neighboring hamlets, looking for work and land.
In its first decades, the local economy rested above all on logging and livestock. The area's forests provided timber, worked in sawmills, while animal raising made use of the mountain fields and valleys. It was a hard life, shaped by the climate and by the distance from the country's main centers.
Those pioneers laid the foundations of local society and gave the town its first productive profile. Over time, though, conservation and the pull of the lakes and mountains would come to matter more than timber and cattle, opening the way to the tourism calling that defines the town today.
The great turning point in the history of San Martín de los Andes came with the creation of Parque Nacional Lanín in 1937. Protecting the araucaria, coihue and lenga forests, the lakes and the imposing Lanín volcano completely changed the town's fate: from a timber and livestock center it slowly became a tourist destination.
The park gave the region a framework for conservation and infrastructure, and put an exceptional landscape in the spotlight. Over the following decades came skiing at Cerro Chapelco, the growing fame of the Ruta de los Siete Lagos towards Villa La Angostura and the boom in nature tourism, sport fishing and trekking. San Martín de los Andes established itself as one of the most important tourism centers in Patagonia.
One distinctive feature of its growth was care for the look of the town. It adopted a building code that favors mountain architecture in stone and timber, with controlled heights and styles, which earned it a reputation as a tidy town in harmony with its setting. Keeping its scale and its character, San Martín de los Andes has reached the present as one of the best-loved destinations in southern Argentina, the gateway to Parque Nacional Lanín and the northern end of the legendary Ruta de los Siete Lagos.