Atlantic Patagonia Travel Guide

This is the Patagonia almost no itinerary includes, and it looks nothing like the one on the postcards. No mountains, no glaciers, no forest. A flat scrub desert that runs to the edge of a cliff and drops into the South Atlantic, and an extraordinary amount of wildlife using it. Puerto Madryn is the base, a working port town on a sheltered gulf. Península Valdés is the hooked spit of land north of it, where southern right whales come into shallow water to calve. Punta Tombo is south, and holds one of the largest Magellanic penguin colonies anywhere, with a boardwalk that runs straight through the middle of it.

The constraint here is the calendar rather than the distance. Both of the headline experiences are seasonal and their seasons only partly overlap. Whales are roughly June to mid-December, penguins roughly September to early April. Come at the wrong end of either window and the coast is quiet in a way that is pleasant but not what you traveled for.

We have traveled the peninsula over four days, been out on the water at Puerto Madryn, and walked the boardwalk at Punta Tombo. The thing worth knowing before you commit is that this coast sits a long way north of the glacier circuit. It is a separate leg of a trip rather than a detour from one, and the people who enjoy it most are the ones who planned it that way.