San Carlos de Bariloche (2) → Esquel

San Carlos de Bariloche (2) → Esquel

Date: Monday, March 15, 2027 · Distance: ~193 mi · Driving time: ~4h 30m (excluding stops) · Open in Google Maps

Road surfaces
Asphalt · 187 mi · 97%
Paved · 3 mi · 1%
Concrete · 2 mi · 1%
Compacted gravel · 1 mi · 0%

This is a day of gradual descent — in altitude, in pace, in the general feel of things. You leave one of Patagonia's most visited cities and travel south into quieter country: a bohemian valley town, a glacial lake at the foot of the Andes, and finally a Welsh-inflected city that most international travellers skip entirely and most Argentines consider one of the region's best-kept secrets.

South on the Ruta 40

The day begins at 10:00 am from San Carlos de Bariloche, heading south on the Ruta Nacional 40. The road out of the city passes along the lakefront before climbing through mixed Andean forest and then opening into a wide, green river valley. The corridor between Bariloche and El Bolsón — roughly 120 kilometres of paved two-lane highway — is one of the more scenic sections of the Ruta 40's northern Patagonian stretch, flanked by the forested foothills of the Andes to the west and the beginning of the steppe to the east, with the Río Quemquemtreu tracing through the valley floor.

El Bolsón

By mid-morning the road arrives at El Bolsón, a valley town of perhaps 35,000 people sitting at around 420 metres (1,380 feet) above sea level, sheltered on both sides by jagged Andean ridgelines. The setting creates a microclimate warm enough to grow hops, berries, and herbs — and it was that combination of mild weather, cheap land, and mountain beauty that drew a wave of counter-cultural migrants from Buenos Aires in the 1970s. The bohemian character they instilled has persisted, and El Bolsón retains a distinctly alternative sensibility that separates it from the more resort-oriented towns to the north. The main avenue, Avenida Sarmiento, is lined with trees and a loose assembly of small restaurants, chocolate shops, and craft breweries — hops cultivation is a point of local pride, and most bars pour something made nearby.

On Tuesday, Thursday, and weekend mornings, the Plaza Pagano at the centre of town fills with the Feria Artesanal, one of the better craft markets in Patagonia: textiles, ceramics, leatherwork, smoked meats and cheeses, preserves, and fresh produce from the surrounding farms. Cerro Piltriquitrón looms above the eastern edge of town, and a partially driveable track leads partway up to the Bosque Tallado — a grove of trees killed in a wildfire and subsequently carved by local artists into a collection of over sixty figures, the work begun in the 1990s as an act of creative mourning for the forest.

Parque Nacional Lago Puelo

From El Bolsón, the route continues south and then turns off on Provincial Route 16 for the short drive to the entrance of Parque Nacional Lago Puelo, arriving around midday. The park occupies just under 28,000 hectares in the northwestern corner of Chubut Province and sits at an unusually low elevation for a Patagonian national park — the lake itself at roughly 200 metres (660 feet) above sea level — which gives it a milder climate and a corresponding richness of species. It was first declared a protected zone in 1937 as an annex of Parque Nacional Los Alerces to the south, and achieved independent national park status in 1971.

The name comes from the Mapuche puelco — "water from the east" — a reference to the river that originates here in Argentine territory and eventually flows westward through the Cordillera into the Reloncaví estuary on the Chilean coast. The lake itself is L-shaped, roughly 19 kilometres long and 180 metres (590 feet) deep at its deepest point, its turquoise colour produced by glacial sediment carried down from the Turbio, Azul, and Epuyén rivers. On clear days the encircling peaks — Cerros Currumahuida, Tres Picos, and Vanguardia — reflect off the surface.

The park occupies an ecological transition zone between the Andean Patagonian forest and the Valdivian jungle of coastal Chile, which means you find plant species from both ecosystems coexisting at unusual proximity: cypress, coihue, and lenga alongside the Chilean hazel, tique, and lingue. The pitra — a close relative of the Chilean myrtle — forms dense stands that are genuinely otherworldly to walk through, their trunks twisted and interlocking in low light. Wildlife includes the pudú, the world's smallest deer species, and the huemul, the larger native Andean deer now listed as endangered across much of its range, which has one of its more significant remaining populations here.

The park entrance is four kilometres from the town of Lago Puelo, and the lakeshore is immediate. At the northern end of the lake, La Playita — one of the few sandy beaches in the region — is the main gathering point: a stretch of pale shore backed by cypress and coihue, the water a deep turquoise that on still days gives back a near-perfect reflection of the encircling peaks. The lake sits at only 200 metres (660 feet) above sea level and in summer warms to around 20°C (68°F) — unusually inviting by Andean standards. Picnic areas with fire pits sit just back from the shore, and this is the plan for lunch. After eating, the Sendero Pitranto Grande begins nearby — a one-kilometre loop through the pitra forest, those knotted, pale-trunked trees whose interlocking canopy creates a genuinely strange interior light, more like a temperate rainforest than anything typical of the steppe. For those with more time, boat excursions run from the dock to Los Hitos — the point on the water where the international boundary with Chile runs, an imaginary line in the middle of a glacial lake at the foot of the Andes.

Into Chubut

After the park, the route rejoins the Ruta 40 and heads south through the small orchard communities of El Hoyo and Epuyén — the heart of what is officially designated the national capital of fine fruit. The microclimate here, sheltered in a valley just above 200 metres, is warm enough to grow raspberries, strawberries, cherries, black currants, red currants, and cassis. Mid-March is the tail end of the harvest season — cherries and strawberries will be finished, raspberries mostly so, but currants, cassis, and blackberries tend to linger, and rosehip ripens late and can be found along the roadsides well into autumn. The chacras (small farms) lining the road sell jams and preserves year-round regardless of what's fresh. After Epuyén, the provincial boundary with Chubut crosses and the valley gradually opens into wider, drier plateau. The stretch from the park to Esquel runs around 160 kilometres.

Esquel

Arrival in Esquel comes in the mid-afternoon, with time to set up camp before dark. With around 35,000 inhabitants, it is the main service city of the Comarca Andina del Paralelo 42 — a loosely defined cultural region centred on the highland communities of northwestern Chubut — and the gateway to Parque Nacional Los Alerces to the west. Despite its size, Esquel has a quiet, slightly alpine character. Its streets are wide, its centre manageable on foot, and its pace considerably slower than Bariloche.

The town's origins are Welsh. In 1885, Welsh settlers from the lower Chubut valley, having claimed most of the viable agricultural land along the Atlantic coast, petitioned the governor of Chubut Province to mount an expedition into the Andes. The party — led by the governor himself, Colonel Luis Jorge Fontana, and accompanied by Welsh volunteers who became known as the Rifleros de Fontana — reached a fertile valley near the Andean foothills that the Welsh called Cwm Hyfryd, "Pleasant Valley." By the late 1880s this had become the settlement of Colonia 16 de Octubre, and in the following decades two towns grew from it: Esquel and Trevelin, the latter name a Spanish rendering of the Welsh trefelin, "mill town." The area became the subject of a boundary dispute with Chile, resolved by arbitration in 1902 — when the Welsh settlers themselves voted to declare the territory Argentine.

That history is still legible in Esquel. There are chapels of the distinctive Welsh colonial style — exposed brick with flush joints — and the Welsh language has been taught continuously in local schools since 1996, supported by the Welsh Government and the British Council. Trevelin, 25 kilometres to the south, is even more visibly Welsh, with teahouses, a tulip field, and a small dragon on the roof of its tourist office.

The town's other defining object is La Trochita — the Viejo Expreso Patagónico, or Old Patagonian Express — a 750mm narrow-gauge steam railway made internationally famous by Paul Theroux's 1978 travel book of the same name. The full line once ran 402 kilometres between Esquel and Ingeniero Jacobacci in Río Negro Province; today only two short tourist sections operate, the one departing from Esquel running 18 kilometres to the Mapuche community of Nahuel Pan and back. The original wooden carriages, each with its own wood-burning salamander stove, depart from the station on the edge of the city centre. Tickets sell out and advance booking is advised.

The city centre itself is compact and pleasant for an evening walk: a main commercial street, a couple of plazas, chocolate shops, and a good range of restaurants.