Explore Argentina

Buenos Aires

The 'Paris of South America' is one of the world's great cities — a metropolis of 15 million people built on European bones and animated by distinctly Argentine passion: tango in the milongas of San Telmo, asado smoke drifting over Palermo's parks, and a theatre and gallery scene that can hold its own against any capital on earth. The city's neighborhoods are as varied as its immigrant heritage: the coloured houses of La Boca, the art nouveau tombs of Recoleta Cemetery, and the Sunday antiques market spread across the cobblestones of San Telmo.

Bariloche

Perched on the eastern shore of Nahuel Huapi Lake with the Andes reflected in the water and Cerro Tronador's permanent snowcap on the horizon, Bariloche is Argentina's alpine town — a Swiss-Bavarian aesthetic transplanted to Patagonia that somehow works. Cerro Catedral, South America's largest ski resort, draws skiers from July to September; the same terrain becomes a hiking and mountain-biking paradise in summer, framed by some of the most dramatic lake-and-mountain scenery in the Americas.

El Calafate

The main reason to come to El Calafate — and it is reason enough — is Perito Moreno Glacier: a 250-square-kilometre wall of blue ice advancing into Lake Argentino at the rate of two metres per day, calving house-sized chunks with a thunderous crack that echoes across the water. Los Glaciares National Park, surrounding the glacier and including the dramatic granite spires of the Fitz Roy range to the north, is one of the great wilderness parks of South America.

Mendoza

Argentina's wine capital sits in the rain shadow of the Andes at 750 metres altitude, its dry, sunny climate and alluvial soils producing Malbec of a depth and quality that has made Mendoza's wineries some of the most visited in the world. The Valle de Uco and Luján de Cuyo districts offer winery-hopping by bicycle; Aconcagua — the highest peak in the Americas at 6,961 metres — looms over the Chilean border, visible from the vine rows on clear days.

Puerto Iguazú

Iguazú Falls — 275 individual falls spread across a 2.7-km horseshoe where the Iguazú River plunges into a gorge shared between Argentina and Brazil — is one of the most spectacular natural events on earth. The Argentine side, accessed through Iguazú National Park, offers boardwalks that run directly above and beside the falls and access to Garganta del Diablo — the 'Devil's Throat' — where the river seems to dissolve into steam and sound.

Salta

The self-styled 'Beautiful City' of the northwest earns its nickname: Salta's colonial centre — a handsome cluster of pink-walled churches, elegant plazas, and peñas (folk music venues) around a tree-shaded main square — survived the Spanish colonial era largely intact. The greater draw is the landscape it accesses: the Lerma Valley and beyond it the Quebrada de Humahuaca, where the Andes fold into polychrome rock formations and indigenous Andean culture remains a living everyday reality.

Ushuaia

The world's southernmost city sits at the end of Ruta Nacional 3, the southernmost highway on earth, backed by the mountains of Tierra del Fuego and facing the Beagle Channel that Darwin sailed in 1832. Tierra del Fuego National Park begins at the edge of town; penguin colonies, whale-watching expeditions, and the Beagle Channel cruise to Estancia Harberton fill the long summer days before the winter darkness closes in.

El Chaltén

Argentina's trekking capital is a village of 1,600 people built around access to the Fitz Roy massif — the granite needles of Cerro Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre that define the skyline of northern Los Glaciares National Park and appear on so many travel posters that their actual scale is always surprising. The classic Laguna de los Tres hike, ending with a direct view of Fitz Roy reflected in a glacial lake at 3,000 metres, is one of the great day walks in South America.

Córdoba

Argentina's second city is a university town of more than 1.5 million people with a colonial heritage — the Jesuit Block, a UNESCO World Heritage Site — and a nightlife culture that runs even later than Buenos Aires. The surrounding Sierras Chicas offer a weekend circuit of Jesuit estancias, hill villages, and river resorts; Córdoba's distinctive local accent marks it as a city with its own identity well apart from the capital.

Tilcara

A small Andean town in the Quebrada de Humahuaca — the UNESCO-listed gorge of polychrome rock that runs north from Jujuy toward the Bolivian border — Tilcara is the best base for exploring one of Argentina's most visually arresting landscapes. The Pucará de Tilcara, a pre-Inca hilltop fortress above the town, and the peñas and craft markets of the village below give the stay both archaeological depth and cultural warmth.

Puerto Madryn

The gateway to Península Valdés — the UNESCO-listed Patagonian peninsula of Atlantic coast wildlife — Puerto Madryn offers some of the best whale-watching in the world from June to December, when southern right whales gather in the sheltered bays to mate and give birth within sight of the beach. Orcas hunting sea lions on the gravel beaches, magellanic penguin colonies at Punta Tombo, and southern elephant seals in their wallowing thousands round out the wildlife calendar.

San Martín de los Andes

A more intimate alternative to Bariloche, San Martín de los Andes at the northern end of the Lake District is a resort town of wooden chalets and lakeside restaurants on the shores of Lago Lacar, with access to the Andean crossing at Paso Hua Hum. The Seven Lakes Route — a 107-km road winding through beech forest between a succession of glacial lakes — connects San Martín to Bariloche in a day's drive through scenery that justifies every Argentine Patagonia superlative.

Rosario

Argentina's third city, the financial and commercial heart of the Pampas, is the birthplace of both Che Guevara and Lionel Messi — two facts that occupy its cultural self-image in approximately equal measure. The Monumento Nacional a la Bandera, a towering Art Deco complex on the Paraná River waterfront commemorating the creation of the Argentine flag, is the most visited monument outside Buenos Aires.

Mar del Plata

Argentina's premier beach resort draws more than eight million domestic tourists each summer to its Atlantic coast of wide sandy beaches, a working fishing port, and a casino culture dating to the late 19th century when Buenos Aires society first followed the Ramos Mejía family to the sea. The colony of South American sea lions at the harbour — visible year-round from the working pier — and the surrounding Sierra de la Ventana day trips give it year-round appeal.

Jujuy

The capital of Argentina's most Andean province, Jujuy sits in a valley at 1,260 metres surrounded by the beginnings of the altiplano, and its colonial churches, markets packed with indigenous Andean crafts, and Carnaval celebrations with a distinctly pagan fervour give it a cultural richness unlike anything in Buenos Aires. It is the natural staging post for the Quebrada de Humahuaca and the high-altitude salt flats and coloured rock formations beyond.

San Juan

San Juan's main claim on travellers is its proximity to Ischigualasto Provincial Park — known as Valle de la Luna (Valley of the Moon) for its barren, wind-sculpted grey clay badlands that preserve the best fossil record of the Triassic period anywhere in the world. The park's otherworldly moonscape, guided in convoys at dawn and dusk when the light changes the colour of the formations, is one of the most alien landscapes in Argentina.

Tucumán

The cradle of Argentine independence — the Casa Histórica de la Independencia in San Miguel de Tucumán is where Argentina declared independence from Spain on 9 July 1816 — Tucumán punches above its size culturally, with the most vibrant street food market scene in the northwest and a colonial urban core that rewards a day's wander. The surrounding province grows 80% of Argentina's lemons and produces the influential nocturna torrontés white grape.

Villa la Angostura

A small resort village on the western shore of Lago Nahuel Huapi in Neuquén province, Villa la Angostura is the starting point for Parque Nacional Los Arrayanes — a forest of the myrtle-like arrayán tree whose cinnamon-coloured bark is found nowhere else in such density, accessible by boat or a 12-km walk along the Quetrihué Peninsula. The town's wooden architecture and lakeside setting make it the prettiest village in the Argentine Lake District.

Neuquén

The capital of Neuquén province serves as the hub for the 'Ruta de los Dinosaurios' — Dinosaur Route — through surrounding badlands that have yielded some of the largest dinosaur specimens ever found, including Patagotitan mayorum, the heaviest animal to ever walk the earth. The Egidio Feruglio Paleontological Museum in nearby Trelew houses these remains in full-scale reconstructions; the Alto Neuquén valley beyond the city produces increasingly respected Patagonian wines.

Trelew

Founded by Welsh settlers in 1886, Trelew and the Chubut Valley retain traces of their Patagonian Welsh heritage in chapels, tea houses, and Welsh-language road signs lining the route south to Gaiman — where descendants of the original colonists still serve afternoon tea in corrugated-iron cottages. The Egidio Feruglio Paleontological Museum in Trelew houses the world's largest known dinosaurs, including Patagotitan mayorum, in full-scale reconstructions that make the museum a destination in its own right.

On the Argentina-Brazil border, the Iguazú Falls cascade across a 2.7-kilometre arc of the Iguazú River in 275 distinct falls — wider than Victoria Falls, taller than Niagara — making this one of the most spectacular natural events on the planet. Argentina's side of the park covers 67,620 hectares of Atlantic Forest protecting jaguars, tapirs, giant anteaters, and more than 400 bird species; the Brazilian side received a separate but complementary UNESCO listing in 1986.

The second-largest national park in Argentina covers the southern Patagonian ice field — the largest ice sheet outside the polar regions — and its most famous feature, Perito Moreno Glacier: a 250-square-kilometre river of blue ice that calves into Lake Argentino in real time while visitors watch from boardwalks. The park's northern sector protects the Fitz Roy massif, whose granite needles above El Chaltén attract some of the world's most technically demanding mountaineering.

This Atlantic Patagonian peninsula is one of the world's most important marine wildlife sanctuaries: southern right whales gather in the Golfo San José and Golfo Nuevo from June to December to mate and calve; southern elephant seals haul out in their thousands; and orcas use a unique 'intentional stranding' technique to hunt sea lion pups at Punta Norte — a behaviour documented at scale nowhere else on earth.

Together these two parks in the arid northwest preserve the most complete continental fossil record of the Triassic period — the 230-million-year era that saw the rise of the dinosaurs — in sedimentary formations of moon-grey clay sculpted by wind into mushrooms, balls, and sphinxes. The Ischigualasto 'Valle de la Luna' yields fossils almost continuously from the rock; guided convoys circle the park at dawn and dusk to catch the light changing the colour of the formations.

In the Patagonian Lake District of Chubut province, Los Alerces protects the largest remaining stands of alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides), the South American equivalent of the redwood — trees that can live for over 3,600 years and reach diameters of four metres. The park's centrepiece alerce specimen, accessible by boat across Lago Menéndez, is estimated at 2,600 years old; the surrounding temperate rainforest and turquoise glacial lakes make it one of the most beautiful parks in Patagonia.

The Quebrada — a 150-km Andean gorge running from Jujuy north to the Bolivian border — is inscribed as a cultural landscape for the 10,000-year continuity of human settlement along this crossroads of Inca, colonial Spanish, and Argentine traditions. The multicoloured Cerro de los Siete Colores (Hill of Seven Colours) above Purmamarca is the visual symbol of the Quebrada; the pre-Inca pucará fortress of Tilcara and the 17th-century churches of Humahuaca complete a layered archaeological record.

Between 1609 and 1767, Jesuit missionaries established a network of reducción missions among the Guaraní people in the jungle borderlands of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay — self-sustaining communities of up to 141,000 people with organised townships, churches, workshops, and schools. The Argentine portion covers the ruins of San Ignacio Miní in Misiones province, whose roofless red sandstone churches, overrun with jungle, are among the most atmospheric ruins in South America; a shared inscription with Brazil covers the full network.

Between 1604 and 1767, the Jesuits built a network of estancias (agricultural estates) around Córdoba to supply their university and college — the oldest in Argentina, founded 1613 — creating the most intact collection of colonial Jesuit architecture in the Americas. The 'Manzana Jesuítica' (Jesuit Block) in central Córdoba and five associated rural estancias represent the full economic and intellectual system of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay: Alta Gracia, Jesús María, Santa Catalina, Caroya, and La Candelaria.

In a river gorge in the Patagonian steppe of Santa Cruz province, the 'Cave of Hands' preserves a gallery of rock art dated from 9,000 to 700 BCE — hundreds of hand stencils created by blowing pigment around hands held against the rock wall, the oldest and largest assemblage of negative hand prints in the Americas. Hunting scenes, geometric patterns, and figures of guanaco and rhea surround the hand gallery in a visual record spanning more than 8,000 years of human presence in Patagonia.

A transnational inscription shared by Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, the Qhapaq Ñan was the 30,000-kilometre road network of the Inca Empire — engineered to traverse every Andean landscape from coastal desert to high-altitude glacier. In Argentina, the route passes through the northwestern provinces, incorporating tambo (way-station) complexes, bridges, and the high-altitude Inca passes of the Atacama altiplano that connected the empire's southern reaches.

Argentina's contribution to this 17-country transnational inscription is the Casa Curutchet in La Plata (1953) — the only Le Corbusier building in the Americas, a white concrete villa built for a local surgeon that applies the Swiss-French master's 'Five Points of New Architecture' to a suburban Argentine site. The building now houses the College of Architects of Buenos Aires province and is open to guided tours; its brise-soleil, pilotis, and roof garden remain in use exactly as Le Corbusier designed them.

Inscribed in 2023, the former Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires served as the largest clandestine detention centre of Argentina's military dictatorship (1976–1983), through which an estimated 5,000 people passed — the vast majority of them killed. Converted into a memory site and museum after the return of democracy, ESMA is now one of the world's most powerful testimonies to state terrorism and human rights resilience, its building preserved with deliberate austerity as evidence.