Tres Lagos
A lunch stop at Tres Lagos, arriving just after midday. The town sits at the junction of RN 40 and Provincial Route 31 — the fork that branches west toward Lago San Martín and the Chilean border — and it was precisely this crossroads function that brought the place into existence. In the early twentieth century, wool-laden wagons from the great estancias of the Lago Argentino and Lago Viedma basins made the month-long haul to the Atlantic coast at Comandante Luis Piedra Buena, and this was the obligatory crossing point. A blacksmith named Fausto Vallina set up here in 1925, and the settlement formed around him. It received its current name in 1937, when it was formally recognised as a town — the name drawn from the three lakes visible from the surrounding hills: Viedma, Tar, and San Martín.
The town remains small, a few hundred residents, and retains a distinctly frontier quality. There is a restaurant on the main drag, a YPF station, and a municipal campground by the river. The old Hotel Alquinta — the original pulpería, built in 1918 from adobe and now a declared provincial heritage building — stands at the western entrance to town, its facade weathered but still standing. The nearby steppe conceals a petrified forest about 20 kilometres to the southeast, reportedly the southernmost in South America, though it lies off the day's route.
The 73 Malditos
North of Tres Lagos, the pavement ends. What follows is the stretch known among motorcyclists and overlanders as los 73 Malditos — 73 kilometres of loose, wind-swept gravel that has earned its own mythology on the RN 40. The surface is corrugated and uneven, the stones prone to throwing a vehicle sideways in the crosswinds that funnel through the plateau. Reduce speed significantly and give the car time to find its rhythm. In rain the road becomes soft and treacherous; in dry conditions, manageable but demanding. This is the last remaining gravel section of the southern RN 40, a reminder of what the whole road looked like not long ago.
The landscape through this stretch is among the most empty on the entire route — a high, wind-blasted meseta with almost no vegetation taller than knee height, occasional lagoons flashing silver in the distance, guanacos watching from the ridgeline. There are no services and no shelter. The road eventually drops off the plateau and rejoins the pavement somewhere around Lago Cardiel, the vast, internally draining lake that sits roughly 70 kilometres west of Gobernador Gregores. From here the final approach to town is paved.
Arrival: Gobernador Gregores
Gobernador Gregores — known until 1958 as Cañadón León — sits in the broad valley of the Río Chico, in the geographic centre of Santa Cruz province. With around 5,000 inhabitants, it is by steppe standards a proper town: a hospital, a supermarket (La Anónima), a YPF station, a bakery near the main square, and a municipal campground with electricity, hot showers, and reasonable wind cover from a stand of trees. The campground is Municipal Nuestra Señora del Valle; the municipal tourism office on the main strip can help with orientation.
The town was founded by José Kuney Posne, an Austrian who built the first house and smithy here in March 1922, serving wagons and carts moving between the cordillera and the coast. The old smithy — la antigua herrería — still stands at the corner of Alberdi and 9 de Julio, and is worth a look. The town was renamed in memory of Juan Manuel Gregores, a lieutenant commander who served as one of the province's more effective governors in the 1930s.
The history here carries weight. The countryside around Gobernador Gregores was one of the sites of the worst violence of the 1921 Patagonian strikes — the episode documented by historian Osvaldo Bayer and brought to wider attention by the 1974 film La Patagonia Rebelde. When estancia workers demanding decent wages, food, and sleeping conditions were met with military repression under Lieutenant Colonel Héctor Varela, hundreds were shot. The bodies of around 200 men killed at the Estancia Bella Vista were taken to a mass grave known as the Cañadón de los Muertos, about seven kilometres south of town along the RN 40. The site is marked with a cenotaph. Since 2009, a provincial law has established a formal historical circuit — the Ruta de la Huelga de 1921 — linking the memory sites across the province, with Gobernador Gregores as its operational base. A three-hour guided tour runs from town to the Bella Vista ranch and back; it is the most direct way to understand what happened here.
Set up camp, walk to the bakery for something warm, and let the steppe settle into the evening.