El Calafate

I arrived in El Calafate on an afternoon flight from Buenos Aires and watched the terrain change through the plane window for the last two hours — the green pampas giving way to brown steppe, then scrub and dust and the occasional salt flat, and then the lake appearing: Lago Argentino, enormously long and that colour again, that turquoise-green that glacial water develops when it carries enough suspended rock flour to alter the wavelength of light. The town was visible at its western end, a grid of low buildings against the brown hillside, and the lake behind it was implausibly radiant in the late afternoon. From altitude, it looked like something had spilled.

El Calafate runs on tourism in a way that Puerto Natales does not quite manage. The main street, Avenida del Libertador, is lined with parrillas and wine bars and outfitters and at least four places selling the same alpaca scarves, and in January it is packed with people who have come from Buenos Aires specifically to see the glacier and who will be on a flight home in four days. This is not a criticism. The town understands its role and performs it efficiently: the restaurants are decent, the hotels are clean, the transfer vans to Perito Moreno run on schedule. The parrilla two blocks off the main street, with the handwritten menu and the wood-burning asado station visible through the kitchen door, serves a rib-eye that makes the tourist infrastructure feel worth tolerating.

But the town has something beyond its function, which is the steppe. An hour outside El Calafate, the landscape opens into emptiness in a way that is genuinely unsettling if you’ve been in cities. Estancia Cristina, accessible by a boat crossing of Lago Argentino that takes two hours through glacier-carved fjords, operates in a valley that has been mostly untouched since the last glacial retreat — fossils in the exposed rock faces, condors working the thermals above the moraine, guanacos crossing the plain in groups of twenty or thirty with the unhurried certainty of animals that have been here longer than everything else.

The calafate berry, from which the town takes its name, is a low thorny shrub that produces a small purple-black berry in late summer — intensely flavoured, somewhere between blueberry and blackcurrant, tart enough to make you wince slightly on the first taste. Local legend says that eating a calafate berry means you will return to Patagonia. I ate a handful off a bush outside the hostel and couldn’t tell if I was performing a superstition or genuinely hoping it would work. Both felt plausible, which might be the point.

The light on Lago Argentino at the end of a clear day, when the sun drops behind the hills to the west and the lake catches the last colour before dark, is one of those natural phenomena that doesn’t photograph well because the camera cannot render the spatial quality of it — the vast horizontal stretch of changing colour, the silence, the scale of it pressing against your peripheral vision. I sat on a bench at the waterfront and watched it twice, on consecutive evenings, and both times felt disproportionately moved by what was, technically, just a sunset over a lake.

When to go: October through April, with the glacier accessible in all seasons but the town most alive from November through March. February brings the highest temperatures and the most crowded parrillas. October is quieter, cooler, and offers the strange beauty of the steppe in early spring — the calafate bushes flowering yellow, the guanacos with new foals on the plain. Fly from Buenos Aires rather than taking the bus from Puerto Natales: the road is long and the light is fading by the time you arrive.