Book El Calafate attraction tickets

Few places on earth make you feel the raw scale of geological time quite like El Calafate. Sitting on the southern shore of Lago Argentino in Argentine Patagonia, this small town of roughly twenty thousand people exists almost entirely in relation to the ice. The Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the third largest freshwater reserve on the planet after Antarctica and Greenland, feeds dozens of glaciers into the surrounding landscape, and El Calafate is the gateway through which most travellers enter that world. The town itself is modest, a single main street lined with restaurants and outfitters, but what surrounds it is extraordinary.

Perito Moreno Glacier draws the majority of visitors, and justifiably so. Unlike most of the world's glaciers, which are retreating at measurable and alarming rates, Perito Moreno maintains a rough equilibrium, advancing into Lago Argentino and periodically calving enormous walls of ice into the water below with a sound like distant artillery. The glacier is roughly thirty kilometres long and stands sixty metres above the waterline at its face, though the bulk of it extends far deeper beneath the surface. Los Glaciares National Park, which protects the glacier and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981, offers several ways to encounter this ice. A cruise along the glacier face gives a sense of its full scale from the water, while guided trekking directly onto the ice, crampons strapped to boots, turns the abstract into something immediate and physical. For those wanting a more immersive experience, the Blue Safari combines kayaking close to the glacier with time on the ice itself.