Patagonia Events

Patagonia’s calendar is mostly natural rather than cultural, with one striking exception.

The southern right whales — June to December

Every winter, southern right whales migrate to the sheltered gulfs on either side of Peninsula Valdes to calve and mate. Numbers peak in September and October, and the gulfs hold hundreds of animals — mothers with newborn calves close inshore, sometimes within a few metres of the beach at El Doradillo, where you can watch them from the shingle without a boat. Regulated boat trips run from Puerto Piramides. The whales were hunted to near-extinction and the population here has recovered substantially, which makes it one of the more encouraging wildlife spectacles anywhere. Around March and April a separate and stranger event occurs on the peninsula’s outer beaches, when orcas deliberately strand themselves in the surf to take sea lion pups, a hunting technique known in only a few places on earth.

Eisteddfod — September and October, Chubut

The Welsh competitive festival of poetry, recitation and choral singing, held at Trelew since 1875 and at Gaiman, conducted in Welsh and Spanish with a bardic chair awarded. A genuine survival of a nineteenth-century emigration.

Winter and snow

Bariloche holds a national snow festival in August, and Ushuaia marks the winter solstice as the Longest Night with fireworks and torchlit skiing.

Trekking season — October to April

Not a festival, but the rhythm the region runs on. El Chalten’s trails, the refuges in Nahuel Huapi and the boat services on the lakes all operate through the southern summer and largely shut outside it; the village of El Chalten itself contracts to a few hundred residents in winter. Planning around that calendar matters more here than around any dated event.

Penguins

Punta Tombo’s Magellanic colony occupies the site from September to March.