A couple of days in El Calafate, Argentina

So, you’re ready to head off and visit Los Glaciares national park, but you’ve also got a couple of days to fill in El Calafate? Here’s what we did in town. El Calafate is a new town, only founded in 1927 and named after the shrub native to southern Chile and Argentina with yellow flowers and dark blue berries. The plant is a symbol for Patagonia and legend has it that anyone who eats a calafate berry will return to Patagonia. The town serves as the jumping off point for tours to Los Glaciares national park and the impressive Perito Moreno glacier, as well as spectacular hiking routes and wildlife. As such, El Calafate exists mainly for tourism, but it’s a vibrant little place with one main street full of tour operators, cafes, restaurants and shops selling the usual tourist tat and premium handmade chocolates.

Flamingos and more at Reserva Laguna Nimez

Along the waterfront of Lake Argentino is a small nature reserve, jam packed with birds to view. It has a 2.5km circular trail with viewpoints, information signs about the wildlife and hides to better view the birds from. The trail is split into different habitats, each planted with native species, including wetlands, Patagonian Steppe and reed environments, and home to different resident and migratory birds. There are over 80 species of birds who live at the site at different times of the year. We went late afternoon and were particularly happy to see chimangos up close, some huge and confident caranchos and a large flock of Chilean flamingos alongside finches in the bushes and ducks and swans on the water.

Glaciarium

The Glaciarium is a state of the art interpretative centre providing information about glaciers in general and the Southern Patagonian ice field in particular, all in an accessible and engaging way. After walking through the exhibition halls, there are a couple of movies which concentrate on the dramatic rupturing of the Perito Merino glacier, when the ice forms a bridge to the land which then dramatically collapses. This event happens on average every four years. Built in 2011, the Glaciarium holds an imposing position overlooking Lake Argentino and the surrounding mountains, around eight kilometres west of town on route 11. We visited the day before we took a trip out to Los Glaciares national park and found it to be an excellent introduction to how glaciers form and move and what to expect when we reached the actual ice. There’s a free bus which leaves on the hour every hour between 12 and 6pm and returns on the half hour.

Intendencia Parque Nacional Los Glaciares

This little park with landscaped gardens is right in the middle of town. It contains information and a series of models relating to the life and times of Francisco Moreno, the Argentine explorer and academic who explored the Patagonian region (although he never reached the glacier named after him) and was instrumental in negotiations with Chile on the international border through the Andes. Moreno was affectionally named ‘Perito’ which means expert or specialist in Spanish. There’s also a display of the machinery used by early national park workers.

The power of the blue dollar

The Blue Dollar is an informal rate of exchange from US dollars to Argentine Pesos on the black market. When we visited, the official rate of exchange was around 200 AR$ to one USD, while the unofficial Blue Dollar rate was around 370 AR$ to a USD, a huge difference. In an increasingly cashless world, it is counterintuitive to carry stacks of hard currency, but in Argentina, cash is king, and the way to make your money go further is to bring US dollars in hard cash. In the most touristy places such as Ushuaia and El Calafate, most shops and restaurants will take dollars and advertise what rate they will exchange, giving change in pesos. In other places, we found we needed to exchange cash at a money exchange first and then spend pesos. “But why- this sounds really weird?” You cry… In recent years, Argentina has entered hyperinflation, with the inflation rate at 100% in 2022, one of the highest in the world. At this rate, money in Argentina loses half its value each year. People in Argentina therefore seek out a stable currency for their savings to avoid this rapid depreciation, such as the US dollar. However, the government has imposed strict controls on residents who can only acquire $200 in USD per month from banks. Anyone who wants more cash in dollars than this must turn to the black market, and the blue dollar rate. Converting today’s peso into USD even at inflated rates is still better than watching the value of your savings dwindle day by day. While it’s not strictly legal, the authorities in Argentina largely turn a blind eye to the money exchange, at least partly because a significant portion of Argentina’s national debt is tied up in dollars so the government need a steady supply of dollars to pay their debts. Luckily, we travelled to South America via Los Angeles so had an opportunity to stock up with plenty of green backs before arriving in Argentina. We heard from some other visitors that Western Union provide a rate similar to the Blue Dollar if you wire yourself money and are prepared to stand in a queue to access the cash. One evening in El Calafate, we went out for a fancy meal in a traditional Argentinian parrilla with plenty of Mendoza malbec. The straight conversion of the bill to dollars would have been $112, but we paid $68 and walked away feeling full and particularly happy with ourselves. Similarly, in Ushuaia, we hired a car for $42 for three days where the price was originally quoted as $76. We have plenty of other examples of discounts on empanadas, icecreams and bus tickets throughout the country.