Junín de los Andes

Junín de los Andes calls itself the Capital Nacional de la Truca — the national trout capital — on a sign at the edge of town, and having spent two days there I’m not inclined to argue. This is a smaller, plainer place than San Martín de los Andes twenty minutes up the road, without the lakefront polish or the chocolate shops. It’s a working Andean town built around the Río Chimehuín and Río Aluminé, and the person you’re most likely to meet at breakfast is a fly-fishing guide comparing notes with a client about where the rainbow trout were holding the day before.

I don’t fish, which made me something of an anomaly in Junín. Lia does, occasionally, and talked our way onto a half-day outing with a local guide named Hugo who had opinions about fly patterns that could have filled a book. I spent most of the morning on the riverbank with a coffee, watching Lia and Hugo wade through water so clear I could see the trout finning against the current before either of them cast a line. She landed two rainbows and released both, looking more satisfied than I’d seen her in days. I decided fishing might be less about the fish than about standing in a beautiful river with nowhere else to be.

The town is the main southern gateway into Lanín National Park, and Volcán Lanín looms over it just as insistently as it does over San Martín — maybe more so, since Junín sits closer to its base. We drove out to Lago Huechulafquen one afternoon, a long, narrow lake that stretches directly toward the volcano, its far end seemingly pinned beneath Lanín’s summit. It’s one of those views that photographs never quite capture, because a photograph can’t convey how the scale keeps recalibrating as you get closer.

The town itself has a Mapuche cultural presence that’s more visible here than in the lake-district towns further south — craft markets selling woven textiles and silverwork, a museum dedicated to Mapuche history, and place names throughout the region that come straight from the Mapudungun language. It gave the visit a texture I hadn’t expected, a reminder that this whole lake district has a history predating the Swiss-chalet aesthetic that gets marketed so heavily an hour up the road.

When to go: November through April for fishing season and access to Lanín National Park’s trails. Trout season generally runs from the second Saturday of November through the Easter long weekend — check current dates before planning around it.