Inside the newest national park in Argentine Patagonia

23.01.2024 - 09:09 / nationalgeographic.com / National Park

Hidden beneath an overhang on steep cliff walls above the Pinturas River Canyon are more than 800 stencilled handprints and painted images of animals. Nobody fully understands why Patagonia’s nomadic hunter-gatherers crafted the graffiti, but we do know they were created around 9,300 years ago using mineral pigments mixed with blood and fat, and that they provide a glimpse of early life in the glacier-carved province of Santa Cruz.  

Declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999, Cueva de las Manos (The Cave of Hands) is a highlight of Patagonia Park, a collection of newly expanded conservation areas in the remote, sparsely populated region. It took me five-and-a-half hours to drive here from the nearest airport, in Comodoro Rivadavia, cruising along empty roads in a landscape of seemingly endless steppe.

Santa Cruz is a place for adventurers and pioneers. In the early 20th century, it attracted hundreds of Europeans fleeing the First World War, hoping to start a new life as sheep ranchers. The eruption of Chile’s Mount Hudson volcano in 1991 ended the dream for many of their descendants, forcing them to abandon their businesses. Since 2012, several of their former farms have been absorbed into Patagonia Park, largely through the work of Fundación Rewilding Argentina. Set up by Tompkins Conservation, the organisation founded by American philanthropists Kris and Doug Tompkins, the foundation raises funds to purchase and restore land, with a view to eventually donating it to the government.

“It takes a long time to create a national park,” says Sofía  Heinonen, the NGO’s executive director, when we meet at La Posta de Los Toldos refuge close to the park’s Cañadón Pinturas Gateway. A fire blazes inside the cosy inn and education centre, where hikers and conservationists gather with maps at long wooden tables. Outside, guanacos (a type of South American camelid) roam freely, after hundreds of miles of farm fences were recently taken down. In a neat turn of events, many of the weathered wooden posts were used to construct the porchway of La Posta. 

At the moment, only around 17,000 tourists visit the park a year. But with the financial support of private charitable organisation The Freyja Foundation, which is working alongside Fundación Rewilding Argentina, improvements in infrastructure are likely to attract many more. As well as the refuge, there are five campsites in the park. A 16-mile network of new and repurposed trails has also been built around the Pinturas River Canyon, with more planned.

Aside from Fundación Rewilding Argentina’s biologists, one of the only people allowed to off-trail in the park is Facundo Epul. He was born and raised in the Santa Cruz town of Perito Moreno; his father and