Villa La Angostura

I almost skipped Villa La Angostura. It sits an hour up the lakeshore from Bariloche, and every itinerary I’d read treated it as a footnote — a lunch stop on the way to San Martín de los Andes. Lia talked me out of that plan, mostly because she’d read that Walt Disney’s animators supposedly used the Arrayanes forest here as reference for the woods in Bambi, and she wasn’t going to let that detail go uninvestigated. We stayed two nights instead of skipping through, and it turned out to be one of the better course corrections of the whole Patagonia leg.

The town itself is smaller and calmer than Bariloche, spread along a bay of Nahuel Huapi with the Andes rising directly behind it rather than across the water. There’s a main strip, Avenida Arrayán, lined with the same chalet architecture and chocolate shops as its more famous neighbor, but without the tour-bus density. I sat on a bench outside a café one morning with a coffee that had gone lukewarm because I kept forgetting to drink it, just watching the light move across the water. Nothing was happening, and it was exactly the right amount of nothing.

The reason to actually come here, though, is the Quetrihué Peninsula, a narrow finger of land jutting into the lake that culminates in the Bosque de Arrayanes — a forest made almost entirely of arrayán trees, which grow nowhere else in these concentrations. Their bark is a deep cinnamon-copper color, cool and almost polished to the touch, and the trunks twist upward in shapes that do genuinely look hand-drawn. You can hike the twelve kilometers out to the grove, or take the catamaran and walk back, which is what we did. Lia set the pace on the return hike specifically so we’d have more time standing among the trees, and I didn’t argue. The light filtering through that canopy has a color to it I haven’t seen replicated anywhere else in Patagonia.

Cerro Bayo, the town’s ski hill, gives Villa La Angostura a winter identity that’s smaller and mellower than Cerro Catedral’s — fewer runs, shorter lift lines, and views over the lake that I’m told are worth the cold alone. We were there in autumn, so I can only report on secondhand enthusiasm from a brewery owner who wouldn’t stop talking about it. What I can report on directly is the Siete Lagos drive north toward San Martín de los Andes, which starts practically at this town’s doorstep and gets more spectacular with every kilometer.

When to go: December through March for lake activities and mild weather. April brings the same fiery lenga foliage as Bariloche with far fewer people to share it with. June through September for skiing at Cerro Bayo, on a much smaller scale than its Bariloche counterpart.