🇦🇷 Argentina · Patagonia
Villa Mascardi is a mountain area some 35 km south of San Carlos de Bariloche, on the shore of Lake Mascardi, inside Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi. It's the gateway to one of the park's most spectacular sectors: the road to Cerro Tronador, the colossus of ice and rock that marks the Chilean border, and to Pampa Linda, the base for mountain outings and for the celebrated Ventisquero Negro.
Lake Mascardi, a characteristic turquoise that shifts with the light, branches out into arms ringed by Andean-Patagonian forest and mountains. The area offers beaches, boating, fishing, kayaking and the chance to head into the heart of the Tronador massif, with its glaciers, waterfalls and mountain refuges. It's one of the most imposing and complete landscapes in the Bariloche region.
For travelers, Villa Mascardi and Lake Mascardi are both base and threshold for great nature excursions: the Tronador and the Ventisquero Negro, the Mascardi, Guillelmo and Los Moscos lakes, the waterfalls, the hiking trails and the link to the south of the Nahuel Huapi. An area of forest, water and high mountains, ideal for anyone after the wildest, most monumental side of the Patagonian Andes.
The Lake Mascardi area is named after the Jesuit father Nicolás Mascardi, a 17th-century missionary who traveled the region and founded a mission near Lake Nahuel Huapi. The area was absorbed into Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi, the country's first, and developed as the access sector for Cerro Tronador and Pampa Linda. The full version is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The province that crosses Patagonia from the cordillera to the sea: Tehuelche and Mapuche land, land of Carmen de Patagones and the Conquest of the Desert, of the apples of the Alto Valle, of Bariloche and the Nahuel Huapi, and of the beaches of Las Grutas.
Read the history of Río Negro →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The turquoise lake that thousands of tourists photograph today on their way to the Tronador carries the name of an Italian Jesuit who was murdered in Patagonia while searching for a city that did not exist: the mythical City of the Caesars. Father Nicolás Mascardi, a 17th-century missionary, played a pioneering role in the exploration and evangelization of the Andean-Patagonian region, traveling these territories when they were the exclusive domain of the indigenous peoples, long before any effective European colonization of Patagonia.
Around the middle of the 17th century, Father Mascardi founded a mission near Lake Nahuel Huapi, with the aim of evangelizing the region's indigenous peoples and, according to the chronicles, of searching for the legendary 'City of the Caesars'. The Nahuel Huapi mission was one of the first European establishments in this part of the Andes, in conditions of enormous isolation and difficulty.
Mascardi died during his expeditions across Patagonia, amid the conflicts and dangers of those missions in indigenous territory. His figure became forever associated with the early history of the region, and his name survives in the place names, especially in Lake Mascardi, one of the great sheets of water in today's Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi.
The Lake Mascardi area was absorbed into Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi, Argentina's first, whose origin goes back to the land donated by the explorer Francisco P. Moreno at the start of the 20th century and to its consolidation as a national park in the following decades. The park's vast territory, which takes in lakes, forests and mountains, included the southern sector with Lake Mascardi and the imposing Cerro Tronador massif.
The Tronador, with peaks above 3,400 meters and hanging glaciers, is the park's colossus and marks the Chilean border. Its name refers to the thundering sound of the ice breaking off its glaciers. The beauty and scale of the area —the turquoise lake, the Ventisquero Negro, the waterfalls and the forests— made it one of the great nature destinations of the Bariloche region.
To organize access to this rugged sector, the Tronador road was built, leaving Villa Mascardi for Pampa Linda and the foot of the massif. Given how narrow the mountain road is, a system of one-way time slots was set up, regulating the direction of traffic in time bands. Pampa Linda established itself as a base for mountaineering and trekking, the starting point for high-altitude refuges and crossings, in the heart of the southern Nahuel Huapi.
Long before the Jesuits arrived and the park was created, the Nahuel Huapi and Lake Mascardi region was inhabited by indigenous peoples. The Poyas, Puelches and, later, Mapuche and Tehuelche communities moved through these forests and lakeshores, living from hunting huemul and guanaco, from fishing, from gathering pehuén pine nuts and from trade on both sides of the Andes through the mountain passes.
The Nahuel Huapi area was a strategic point in that cross-Andean exchange, which partly explains why the Jesuit missionaries were interested in settling there in the 17th century. After centuries of relative autonomy, these communities were subdued at the end of the 19th century by the so-called Conquest of the Desert, which incorporated Patagonia into the Argentine state and radically transformed the life of its original inhabitants, many of whose Mapuche descendants are still present in the region and assert their historic link with this land.
The origin of Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi —and with it the protection of the Lake Mascardi and Tronador area— is tied to the figure of the explorer Francisco Pascasio Moreno. In 1903, Moreno donated to the state a parcel of land he had received as a reward for his work marking out the border with Chile, on the express condition that it be kept as a public park. That founding gesture gave rise, in 1922, to the Parque Nacional del Sud, the direct forerunner of the Nahuel Huapi.
In 1934, a national law formally created Parque Nacional Nahuel Huapi, the first in Argentina, along with the institution that would later become the Administración de Parques Nacionales. Under the direction of Exequiel Bustillo, an ambitious program of works and tourism development was driven forward that transformed Bariloche and its surroundings, including the opening of roads to sectors such as Lake Mascardi and the foot of the Tronador, hard to reach until then.
Through the 20th century, Villa Mascardi consolidated as a small settlement and, above all, as the threshold to one of the most spectacular sectors of Parque Nahuel Huapi. The one-way system on the Tronador road, the services at Pampa Linda and the high-altitude refuges of the Club Andino Bariloche organized access to a fragile mountain area of enormous scenic value.
In recent years, the area was also the scene of a territorial conflict that put Villa Mascardi on the front pages: between 2017 and 2022, the Mapuche community Lof Lafken Winkul Mapu occupied Parques Nacionales land and private properties in the area, in a territorial claim that included episodes of violence and a fierce legal and political dispute, with the death of the young Rafael Nahuel during a police operation in November 2017 as its most tragic chapter. The occupation ended on 4 October 2022 with an eviction ordered by the Federal Court, and since then the area has remained under guard while negotiations continue over the rewe (ceremonial site) and the communities' claims. The episode revived deep debates about land ownership, the rights of indigenous peoples and conservation inside a protected area. Beyond those conflicts, Villa Mascardi keeps its role as the gateway to the Tronador, the Ventisquero Negro and the lakes of the southern park, in an always delicate balance between tourism, local life and the protection of an exceptional natural heritage.
Nicolás Mascardi's adventure in Patagonia is inseparably tied to one of the great myths of the American conquest: the City of the Caesars, a legendary metropolis of fabulous riches which, according to the belief of the day, lay hidden somewhere in the Patagonian Andes. Born in Sarzana, Italy, in 1624, Mascardi had entered the Jesuit novitiate in Rome at barely fourteen and came to America as a missionary, finally posted to the Chiloé region in southern Chile.
One specific episode set his search alight. Among the Poya people Mascardi had freed from a jail in Calbuco was Huageluen, wife of a Nahuel Huapi chief who had been taken captive into Chilean territory. Mascardi stepped in to free her and escorted her back towards her homeland; during that journey, the woman assured him she knew of the existence of the City of the Caesars and offered to guide him in his search. Convinced by that account, the Jesuit crossed the Andes in 1670 and founded, on the shore of the 'great lake' —today's Nahuel Huapi, on the Huemul peninsula—, the historic Nahuelhuapi Mission, with the twin purpose of evangelizing the Poyas and Puelches and of finding the mythical city.
In the years that followed, Mascardi undertook as many as four expeditions in search of the Caesars; according to the boldest accounts, he may have reached the Santa Cruz river, though more cautious historians limit his travels to the northwest of today's Chubut. The outcome was tragic: on 15 February 1674, Father Mascardi was killed by a group of Poyas opposed to the mission, which was then abandoned for almost three decades. His name, however, endured: today it is carried by the lake and the villa that stretch south of Bariloche, the threshold of the road to the Tronador.