The day runs south along one of the most celebrated drives in Argentina — a long, lake-strewn corridor through two national parks where the road barely outruns its own scenery. It is not a day for covering distance quickly. Every bend offers another lake, another pull-off, another reason to stop.
The Drive South: Ruta de los Siete Lagos
The departure from San Martín de los Andes is at 9:00 am, heading south on the Camino de los Siete Lagos — the popular name for the stretch of Ruta Nacional 40 that connects the town to Villa La Angostura and, beyond it, Bariloche. The route threads through two national parks in sequence: first Lanín, whose forests are dominated by ancient araucaria monkey-puzzle trees, then Nahuel Huapi, the oldest national park in Argentina, established in 1922 and reconfigured in 1934. The road was fully paved only in 2015, after decades of works, and still feels surprisingly intimate given its fame — two lanes of winding asphalt that follows the contours of valleys and lake shores rather than imposing on them.
The seven lakes the route is named for are Machónico, Falkner, Villarino, Escondido, Correntoso, Espejo, and Nahuel Huapi, though the count depends on the source. There are in fact more than seven visible from the road, and the naming has always been somewhat elastic. What is consistent is the quality of the water — deep, cold, glacially formed, ranging in colour from emerald to cobalt depending on depth and time of day.
Lago Falkner
The first planned stop is Lago Falkner, roughly 48 kilometres south of town. The lake takes its name from Thomas Falkner, an eighteenth-century English Jesuit missionary and naturalist who spent nearly four decades studying the peoples and landscapes of Patagonia and is credited with recording what may be the first fossil find in present-day Argentina. The lake itself sits just inside the boundary of Nahuel Huapi National Park — a crossing that happens quietly, without ceremony, somewhere in the forested section north of the water. There is a small mirador with a parking area and an information board beside the road, and a beach below that is one of the more approachable along the route. The peak of Cerro Falkner rises behind it.