History of El Chaltén

Indigenous peoples

The Aonikenk, "people of the south" in their own language, also known as Tehuelche (a name of Mapuche origin), were the last indigenous people to inhabit what is now the province of Santa Cruz. They were the southernmost group of the great continental Tehuelche complex: their territory stretched from the Santa Cruz River to the Strait of Magellan, and from the Atlantic coast to the foot of the Andes. North of the Santa Cruz River, as far as the Deseado, lived the northern Tehuelche, or Mecharnúekenk, with whom they moved, met and traded, because the boundaries between them were never rigid. The El Chaltén region, north of the Santa Cruz River, lay within that meeting ground.

They were nomadic hunter-gatherers. They roamed the steppe following their main prey, the guanaco and the choique, or lesser rhea, and also made use of the sea coast and, to a lesser extent, the edges of the forest. They set up temporary camps, called aike, a word still found in many place names across Santa Cruz, such as Camusu Aike. From their prey they obtained food, warmth and the hides for their tents, which they pitched and struck according to the season.

The traces of these peoples are still in the landscape. In the Lake Viedma basin, archaeologists and geologists from the Universidad Nacional de la Patagonia Austral (Río Gallegos Academic Unit) study the remains of the hunter-gatherers who lived there over some 10,000 years: stone tools, ancient hearths and rock engravings in caves and rock shelters. Some pieces are made of obsidian brought from about 400 kilometers (250 miles) away, a sign of how far people, objects and ideas traveled. At the Cerro Índice archaeological site, on the eastern shore of the lake, researchers identified the Aonikenk occupation of the last few centuries, when European glass began to replace stone in the making of scrapers. Much of this material lies on the surface, within anyone's reach, which makes it very vulnerable: if you find any remains, do not touch or move them.

No major settlements are known near El Chaltén: because of their beliefs, the Aonikenk avoided the forests and the high mountains. But the mountain was part of their world. It was they who called the peak that dominates the valley chaltén, a name that according to different sources means "smoking mountain", "bluish mountain" or "sacred mountain", after the clouds that almost always surround its summit. In 1877 the explorer Francisco Pascasio Moreno, surveying the region of the great lakes, renamed it Fitz Roy in honor of the captain of the Beagle, Robert FitzRoy. Today both names coexist, and the town chose the original one. Its place in the Aonikenk worldview is told in the legend of Elal, the creator hero of their people.

Their first sustained contacts with Europeans took place on the coast. Between 1778 and 1784, the Spanish Crown, under King Charles III, launched a plan to settle the Patagonian coast in order to assert its sovereignty against other powers, especially Great Britain. It recruited more than 2,000 settlers, mostly farming and craftsmen families from Galicia, Asturias and Castile and León, including Maragatos from the León region. In southern Patagonia, the clearest case was the colony of Floridablanca, on San Julián Bay (1780-1784), abandoned because of the harsh climate, scurvy and its cost. From there, in 1782, Antonio de Viedma traveled inland toward the Andes and reached the lake that now bears his name, on whose shores El Chaltén stands.

A century later, with the advance of the Argentine state into Patagonia, known as the Conquest of the Desert (1878-1885), and the subsequent occupation of the land by sheep ranches, the Tehuelche population declined dramatically, and the survivors were marginalized and forgotten for decades.

In recent generations, the descendants of this people have regrouped into organized communities, which today work to recover their cultural and territorial heritage and to integrate into the society of Santa Cruz. In 2012, the Copolque (Las Heras) and Camusu Aike communities presented the Tehuelche Flag of the Province of Santa Cruz, officially recognized since June 11 of that year as a symbol of the province's indigenous peoples.

The border with Chile

After independence, Argentina and Chile inherited an undefined border in the south of the continent. In 1881 they signed the Boundary Treaty, which set the border along "the highest peaks of the Andes that divide the waters". The rule seemed clear on paper, but in the still unknown southern Andes it proved almost impossible to apply: many rivers rise east of the highest peaks and flow into the Pacific, so the highest peaks and the watershed did not always coincide.

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To survey the terrain, both governments set up boundary commissions, which spent years exploring a region with no maps. Moreno led the Argentine commission, and his teams were joined by guides, sailors and adventurers who would end up staying in the area. One of them was the Dane Andreas Madsen, born in 1881 in Handbjerg, Jutland. A sailor since the age of 15, he arrived in Buenos Aires in 1901 aboard the steamer Skanderborg, determined to leave the sea and try his luck in Argentina. A few months later he was hired by the commission for his seafaring skills, and in November of that year he set off for Patagonia: he landed at Puerto Madryn and continued overland to lakes Buenos Aires, San Martín and Viedma. He settled at the foot of Fitz Roy and told the story of those years in his book La Patagonia vieja. In 1902 King Edward VII of Great Britain issued an arbitral award that settled most of the Patagonian border, but left some sections open to differing interpretations. One of them was Lago del Desierto, a few kilometers from where El Chaltén stands today.

The expeditions

In 1887 the Italian Salesian missionaries arrived in Patagonia. One of them, Father Alberto María De Agostini, a priest, geographer and photographer, began exploring the Fitz Roy region in the 1930s. His photographs of an almost unknown Andes, and his book Andes Patagónicos, reached Europe and sparked enormous interest among alpinists. From 1937 the first expeditions began to arrive with the aim of climbing these peaks, ushering in an era of great feats of world mountaineering.

Fitz Roy, 3,405 meters (11,171 ft) high, was first climbed on February 2, 1952, by the French climbers Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone. Cerro Torre had a longer and more controversial history: in 1959 the Italian Cesare Maestri claimed to have reached the summit with the Austrian Toni Egger, who died on the descent, but the ascent could never be proven. The first undisputed ascent came in 1974, when the Italians Casimiro Ferrari, Daniele Chiappa, Mario Conti and Pino Negri reached the summit via the west face. Since then, El Chaltén has been one of the world's great climbing destinations, and many of its place names (Poincenot, De Agostini, Maestri) recall that era.

The National Park

In 1937 Los Glaciares National Park was created to protect one of the great remnants of the last ice age: a broad mountain belt defined by the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, the native forests around it, part of the steppe and a rich biodiversity. Covering 726,927 hectares, it is the largest national park in Argentina, and in 1981 UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site.

Fitz Roy marks the northern boundary of the park, and El Chaltén is the gateway to its northern sector. Learn more in The National Park.

El Chaltén and Lago del Desierto

For decades, the Lago del Desierto area remained in dispute. On November 6, 1965, tension erupted in a clash between Argentine gendarmes and Chilean carabineros in which Chilean lieutenant Hernán Merino was killed. The incident made headlines over a border conflict that had lasted almost a century.

In that context, El Chaltén was founded on October 12, 1985, at the confluence of the De las Vueltas and Fitz Roy rivers, 37 km (23 miles) from Lago del Desierto. It was a geopolitical decision: to secure the Argentine presence in a disputed area. The early years were hard. Electricity came from a diesel generator that was switched off at night, when the only light in the valley was candlelight in each house and government office. For any checkup or medical care you had to travel to El Calafate or, to be safe, to Río Gallegos, along a rough gravel road that was not for every vehicle.

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Finally, on October 21, 1994, an international arbitration tribunal made up of Latin American jurists ruled in favor of Argentine sovereignty over Lago del Desierto. That same month, residents raised the Argentine flag on the town flagpole.

Many of El Chaltén's streets are named after the pioneers who arrived in the area in the early 20th century, most of them European immigrants like Madsen.

From base camp to National Trekking Capital

In just a few decades, El Chaltén went from a handful of houses and a base camp for mountaineers to become Argentina's National Trekking Capital. Paving the road in 2003 finally brought it close to El Calafate and the rest of the country. With travelers arriving from all over the world came a growing range of accommodation, restaurants, breweries and services, and the De las Vueltas River valley added new options, from horseback riding and kayaking to glamping.

Despite its growth, the town keeps its human scale and the spirit of its beginnings: a young place, built by people who chose to live at the foot of the mountains.