New beginnings on the high plains of Patagonia

We have all been guilty of overly elaborate courtship rituals. But if there were a zoological Oscar for the most flamboyant and bizarre courtship display, the hooded grebe, late of Patagonia, would be a favourite nominee.

This being Argentina, its performance has been compared to the tango. On the water, the two birds face one another. There are a lot of sudden head turns, a lot of dramatic changes of direction. There is chest bumping, double-jointed neck bobbing, a curious belly flop, and an exciting moment when, with furiously paddling feet, both birds rise from the water, like ballet dancers performing an échappé.

The hooded grebe is endemic to the high plateaus of Patagonian Argentina. Listed as critically endangered, there are thought to be fewer than 800 left. Their vulnerability has kick-started a quiet revolution in Patagonia, a reassessment of this strange haunting place, and a new economic opportunity.

I was keen to see what was going on with the hooded grebe, but actually I was even keener to see Patagonia again. It is thrilling, the scale of it, the solitude, those long empty roads, the Patagonian winds sweeping vast skies clean, the Andes rising in the west. There is something sweetly melancholy about Patagonia. Once a kingdom of hope, people came here to dream, to build a new world at the end of the world. All that space encouraged absurd ambitions. Now it is just learning to be itself, to go back to what it was, once upon a time.

From Comodoro Rivadavia, on the Atlantic coast, I set off in Patagonia’s ride of choice: a 4×4 pick-up, with a couple of tattered maps, some Jorge Luis Borges essays on Argentina, a few phone numbers scrawled in the back of my notebook and the happy belief that in all that mesmerising space, petty concerns would reveal themselves as petty.

I drove six hours across the breadth of Argentina from the Atlantic to the Andes. Patagonia unfurled around me into unfathomable distances. Feeble fences enclosed estancias the size of English counties. Sometimes there were horses, grazing free, and guanaco, the elegant wild cousin of the llama. Sometimes there was a gaucho, cresting a ridge, silhouetted against clouds, a dog trotting at his heels, a wave of sheep eddying across slopes of yellow grass. Mirages appeared on the tarmac road, the approaching vehicles shimmering through watery illusions, afloat on their own reflections. When the Andes first appeared, they seemed like another mirage, something ghostly, tangled among clouds, another trick of the light.   

Patagonia is the land of great drives, and people come from all over the world to tackle the iconic Ruta 40, running north to south down Patagonia’s spine, in camper vans, 4x4s, family sedans, motorbikes and on bicycles. After a night in the town of Los Antiguos, hard by the Chilean border, I headed south on the less famous but equally spectacular Ruta 41, through a savage uninhabited country. The gravel road twisted in woods of fairytale trees then broke free to vistas of scarred ethereal mountains rearing above water meadows where horses grazed. For four hours I saw almost no one.

Eventually I emerged in the Posadas valley beneath the great summit of San Lorenzo, trailing long scarves of cloud. Below were two lakes in the lap of baked hills. Lago Posadas was electric blue, Pueyrredón the most delicate green. On the isthmus between them — a moraine left behind by retreating glaciers — I could see the red roofs of the Lagos del Furioso inn.

In the early 1990s, a Buenos Aires couple, Ana Bas and Jorge Cramer, fell in love with this place. They bought the land and built a small lodge of delightful wooden cabins. Thirty years later, Lagos del Furioso — named for the Río Furioso that roars down from the glaciers — is run by their son, Gregorio Cramer, a filmmaker, and his childhood friend, Alejandro Azpiazu. They are like guys in a buddy movie — handsome, sun-bleached, charming, always up for larks. Gregorio spent his childhood here, and perhaps that is why it seems to belong to a more innocent age, before anyone used the word gentrification — the old-fashioned painted cabins tucked among poplar trees, a dining room awash with light and views of mountains, a cosy reading room with its library of Patagonian books.

I spent three days at the lodge. I went fly fishing for trout with my usual spectacular lack of success. I picnicked in the gorge where the Río Furioso plunges through a narrow defile. I kayaked on the lake and spent an afternoon alone on the world’s emptiest beach. One night I watched the reflections of constellations trembling in the black mirror of Lago Posadas. With the reflections below and the night sky above, I seemed to float among galaxies.

In the evenings I talked about Patagonia with Gregorio, about the explorers who travelled here in the 19th century and the people who settled here at the beginning of the 20th, running vast estancias with thousands of sheep. This was the future once in Patagonia: large-scale livestock grazing offering opportunities to settlers from the Old World.

Further along the lakeshore was one of the first European estancias here, a rambling adobe house hunkered in a stand of windbreak poplars and surrounded by fences of weathered planks. This was once the home of Emma Miglio, who came to Patagonia from Italy at the beginning of the 20th century. There was a husband — apparently she had met him on the boat from Montevideo to Buenos Aires — but he died, leaving her a widow in this remote place.

She was known as the Queen of Pueyrredón, appropriate perhaps as the estancia was the size of a kingdom. She ran a small shop, catering to travellers coming across the passes from Chile, and rented rooms to gauchos. When the gauchos gave her trouble, she opened a window and called up to a Tehuelche man who lived behind the property and who saw himself as her protector.  

The Tehuelche were the native people of these regions. Sickened by European diseases and then crowded off their lands by European settlement, their migrations and hunting parties were disrupted by the fences the settlers erected to mark their property and contain their livestock. It is believed the last speaker of the Tehuelche language died in 2019.

To understand the fate of Patagonia’s European estancias, I was heading to Parque Patagonia. Created in 2012, it is one of four conservation projects in threatened habitats run by Rewilding Argentina. It was the plight of the hooded grebe that originally drew attention to conservation here; the project began with efforts to save the birds’ breeding lakes. But Parque Patagonia has since outgrown the original plateau reserve where the birds perform their elaborate courtship.

Straddling the iconic Ruta 40, the park is now roughly 182,000ha, composed of former ranches that, funded by private benefactors and conservation charities, Rewilding Argentina has been able to purchase or lease. They have stripped out the fencing, installed a park infrastructure of trails, camping areas, viewpoints and information boards, built the Planetarium and Interpretation Centre, concluded wildlife surveys and made plans for the reintroduction of species such as the huemul deer that have been lost to this landscape for decades.

About 93,000ha have already been donated to the Argentine government to be run as part of its national park programme. The rest is still managed by Rewilding Argentina which, at the end of last year, completed a stylish renovation of La Posta de Los Toldos, the park lodge. It is like staying in a chic ranch house in Montana with a great chef and a good wine list. I kept expecting Kevin Costner to turn up in cowboy boots and a big hat.  

At the heart of Parque Patagonia is a remarkable prehistoric art gallery, La Cueva de las Manos Pintadas (the Cave of the Painted Hands). I followed the roads through a skeletal landscape where the steppe was broken by colossal canyons. Rheas flounced by, their feathers like bedraggled ball gowns. A family of guanacos lifted their heads to watch me pass. A pair of desert foxes trotted away down a canyon, intent on their foxy business. Finally the road curved down to the ledges above the Canyon of the Río Pinturas. Willow trees shimmered in the valley below.   

High up on rock overhangs are the usual paintings of hunting scenes. But it is the imprint of hands that makes this place special. Hundreds of human handprints cover the cliff face. They are the signature of the indigenous people who once sat on these ledges, thousands of years ago, watching the animals in the canyon below. It is moving, and strangely timeless. As an artwork, the prints — they are actually “negatives”, the hands placed on the rock and paint blown over them — could sit happily in a contemporary gallery. Though difficult to date, Unesco estimates the earliest to be from about 13,000 years ago.  

The irony of Patagonia is that the settler estancias, whose arrival spelt the end of the indigenous cultures, are now also under threat. Here in Santa Cruz province, 40 per cent of the estancias have been abandoned. The price of wool collapsed in the 1990s and has never really recovered. Overgrazing has degraded the Patagonian steppe. And no one wants to be a gaucho any more. Economically, ranching has become a dead end. Perhaps the Tehuelche had the right idea — Patagonia is a landscape that requires the lightest of human footprints.  

I spent a day in the park with Facundo Epul, a young naturalist guide. Patagonia’s past and its future, and the conflict about its fate, ran through his family. “My father is a rancher. He won’t even speak to the park people,” Facundo said. “He thinks the park is undermining Patagonia’s way of life.”

But Facundo sees things differently. He understands that the estancias, the world of sheep ranching, where wildlife was an enemy, is in decline. And that rewilding, in selected places, can provide an alternative. On an estancia of 60,000ha, the ranchers employed only a handful of people. The section of the park run by Rewilding Patagonia employs 25 people year-round, and another 30 during the seven months of the high season, a number that will grow as the park attracts more visitors. It also provides and supports infrastructure for the whole region. And its income, unlike the wool trade whose profits often ended up in Buenos Aires, is spent locally.

People of Facundo’s generation — he is in his twenties — understand that rewilding is not just a nature-lover’s naivety. For him, it offers an economic opportunity that his father’s estancia no longer could. Of course, Parque Patagonia is not a self-sustaining business. Rewilding Argentina relies on philanthropic donations. And when their last portion of the park is handed over to the Argentine government, it will depend on state funding like national parks anywhere, but there is growing recognition that the return in regional development is considerable.

I didn’t get to see the dance of the hooded grebe. Their mating season is short. But naturalist Emanuel Galetto, one of the park team, tells me their fate still hangs in the balance. In spite of their splendid courtship, their reproduction rate is low: on average only 0.2 offspring per adult per year. They are susceptible to predation and competition for resources from two introduced species — the American mink and rainbow trout.  

I did, however, see Parque Patagonia’s keystone species, its apex predator. Facundo and I had left the car to walk into Caracoles Canyon. It had a cathedral hush, aisles of fresh grass, arches of blue sky, the soaring walls decorated with mineral colour. We picnicked on rock pews. Winds funnelled down the canyon as if it was whistling through organ pipes. I watched a pair of condors step from the ridge line into the high blue air, sailing from one side of the canyon to the other without a single beat of their 10ft wings.  

And then a puma appeared, several hundred metres away, stepping carefully with a mixture of stealth and menace. Perfectly camouflaged among almond-coloured boulders, it was setting off on its evening hunt.

“When I was a boy,” Facundo said, “all the talk on the ranch was of hunting the puma. The hope was to eradicate them. But hopes have changed. My children are going to see puma, and I hope their children too.”    

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