I’ll be honest with you: we weren’t really planning on staying in El Calafate for as long as we did. But if you find yourself stranded for a week somewhere, you could certainly do a lot worse than this.
El Calafate is a small city of around 30.000 inhabitants, situated on the turquoise shores of the “Lago Argentino” lake and close to the “Los Glaciares” National Park. A UNESCO World Heritage site since 1981, the park is home to the 60-meters-high Perito Moreno glacier and a wide range of wildlife that we didn’t manage to spot even once.
There is a lot to do in and around the city. You can take a boat tour around the lake, take a tour to the nearby cave paintings with traditional lunch inside a cave (!), have a panoramic Safari that gets you deeper into the mountains to visit the wild guanacos and condors, and/or have a taste of Argentinean cuisine in the many restaurants and bakeries in town. If you have your long-distance camera at hand, the Laguna Nimez Reserve is home to over 70 species of birds including, for some reason, a lake full of flamingos.
El Calafate is a good jumping point to explore the region: you can visit the city of El Chaltén for some trekking (which we did!), walk on and around the glacier (which we also did!), visit the Chilean “Torres del Paine” National Park, or travel 280 Km South to Puerto Natales. Alternatively, you can stay in town as we did and make friends with the street dogs, listen to the Bandurrias (also known as black-faced ibis, these cute birds drove our tour guide crazy), and buy some souvenirs (surprisingly, not mass-produced in China). You should probably also try the calafate marmalade since you’re there, but neither of us felt strongly in favour of it. When in doubt, you can stick to the local chocolate.
For a city where WiFi only kind of works (and only while in your hotel’s lobby), you will find your amenities covered: the local supermarket opens until late, most places take credit cards, bakeries have plenty of on-the-go food, and store owners tend to speak some English. There’s also a local bank, but it would be better for you to bring enough local currency beforehand – dollars will get you everywhere, but the exchange rate will suck.
