Mirador del Gran Bajo San Julián
About 50 kilometres south of Puerto San Julián, back on Ruta 3, a roadside mirador appears on the right — easy to miss if you're not watching for it. What it overlooks is not immediately obvious from the highway shoulder: the Gran Bajo de San Julián, the deepest continental depression in the Americas. At its lowest point, Laguna del Carbón, the land sits 105 metres (344 feet) below sea level — lower than Death Valley in California, lower than anywhere else in the Western or Southern Hemispheres, and the seventh-lowest point on the surface of the Earth.
The viewpoint looks out over the basin from above, the depression spreading wide and flat below, an endorheic salt lake system that collects water with nowhere to drain. The geological history embedded here is substantial: the basin exposes Jurassic volcanic formations, Eocene fossil plant outcrops, and large concentrations of Oligocene and Miocene marine invertebrate fossils — the sea floor of an older ocean, now hundreds of metres below the plateau surface that surrounds it. The province of Santa Cruz declared the area a Natural Monument in 2004. The lake itself sits on private property and is not accessible, but the view from the mirador is genuine and the information board — in Spanish — puts the figures in context.
Arrival: Comandante Luis Piedra Buena
Comandante Luis Piedra Buena sits on the left bank of the Santa Cruz River, roughly 240 kilometres north of Río Gallegos. The town is small — around 4,000 to 5,000 inhabitants — and has the feel of a place that knows it sits in the middle of a long road between larger places. What distinguishes it from the surrounding steppe is the river itself: the Santa Cruz runs broad and cold out of Lago Argentino near El Calafate, carrying glacial meltwater almost 400 kilometres to the Atlantic. Along its banks here, a band of woodland extends for several kilometres, the willows and poplars giving the settlement an oasis quality genuinely unusual in this landscape.
The town takes its name from Luis Piedra Buena, an Argentine naval officer born in 1833 who dedicated much of his life to asserting Argentine sovereignty over the largely empty southern territories at a time when the state had little presence there. In 1859 he explored the Santa Cruz River and settled on a river island nearby — Isla Pavón — where he built a trading post and a house, raised the Argentine flag for the first time in the region, and established what became the first stable settlement in the area. The settlement went by the name Paso Ibáñez until 1933, when it was formally renamed in his honour. The island, 3 kilometres from the current town centre between the two road bridges over the river, now holds a museum in the reconstructed house, a small lodge, and camping plots. It's accessible by car.
The camping is well situated on the river — the woodland provides shelter from the wind that dominates the open steppe, and the river setting is genuinely pleasant. The Santa Cruz is one of the few places in Argentina where steelhead trout are caught; the fish fatten at sea and travel nearly 380 kilometres upstream to spawn in the river above, and fly fishing here has a devoted following.