Atlantic Patagonia Travel Guide

This is the Patagonia almost no itinerary includes, and it looks nothing like the photographs that sell the region of Patagonia. There are no mountains, no glaciers, and no forest. Instead you have a flat scrub desert that runs to the edge of a cliff and drops into the South Atlantic, and an extraordinary amount of wildlife making use of 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 sits to the south and holds one of the largest Magellanic penguin colonies anywhere, with a boardwalk that runs straight through the middle of it. Choosing to travel here is entirely dependent on the seasonality of the wildlife that defines this region.

Four days is enough to see the region well, and direct flights only run from Buenos Aires. That combination makes this the one part of Patagonia that works better as a trip of its own than as a leg of a longer route, and it is worth planning it that way rather than trying to squeeze it in.