Natural Wonders of Argentina: The 6 Most Beautiful Places to Visit

Argentina stretches nearly the length of a continent, but its natural showpiece is Patagonia in the deep south, where the Southern Patagonian Ice Field — one of the largest bodies of ice outside the poles — feeds dozens of glaciers. The most famous, Perito Moreno, calves thunderously into a glacial lake within the UNESCO-listed Los Glaciares National Park. Beyond the ice lie steppe, Andean peaks, lake districts, and, in the north, subtropical forest shared with the Iguazú falls. Below are the 6 natural wonders of Argentina in the atlas — the most beautiful places to build a trip around, each with what makes it remarkable, when to go, and how to reach it. Best overall time: The Patagonian summer (roughly November–March) for milder weather and long days in the south; the region is windy and changeable year-round.

Península Valdés

Chubut, Patagonia, Argentina

A windswept Patagonian peninsula and its sheltered gulfs — one of the world's premier marine-wildlife havens, where southern right whales calve close to shore and orcas hunt seals on the beach.

Marine sanctuary Latin America

Aconcagua

Aconcagua Provincial Park, Mendoza Province, Argentina

The highest mountain in the Americas and the loftiest peak outside Asia — a colossal Andean massif of rock, snow and thin air near Mendoza, and the most accessible of the world's Seven Summits.

Mountain Latin America

Esteros del Iberá

Corrientes Province, northeastern Argentina

One of the largest freshwater wetlands on Earth — a vast mosaic of marsh, lagoon and floating island in northeast Argentina, and the stage for South America's most ambitious rewilding, which has returned the jaguar to the region after 70 years.

Wetland Latin America

Mount Fitz Roy

Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Argentina

A sheer granite spire on the Argentina–Chile border towering above El Chaltén in Los Glaciares National Park — one of the most dramatic and technically feared peaks on Earth, wreathed in the cloud the first peoples read as smoke.

Mountain Latin America

Perito Moreno Glacier

Los Glaciares National Park, Santa Cruz, Argentina

A vast, active glacier in Argentine Patagonia whose towering blue ice face calves thunderously into a lake — one of the few large glaciers on Earth that has stayed roughly in balance rather than sharply retreating.

Glacier Latin America

Quebrada de Humahuaca

Jujuy Province, northwestern Argentina

A long, arid mountain valley in Argentina's far northwest, walled by hillsides banded in reds, ochres, greens and purples — a UNESCO-listed cultural landscape carved by the Rio Grande and travelled for ten thousand years.

Rock formation Latin America