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El Calafate is situated on the southern shore of the Argentinean Lake; 315 km. far from Rio Gallegos, capital of Santa Cruz province. Surprises visitors with a steppe landscape, width views, the turquoise of the Argentinean Lake and the peculiar vegetation of a deserted region.
You must pass through El Calafate before visiting Los Glaciares National Park. The town is mostly dedicated to offer tourists services, with a wide hotel supply, transport services, trips and a variety of restaurants.
This town was in the beginning a place just to overnight with country corts, in times where this region was inhabited only to breed sheep and sell the wool. After long time wool international prices made this business last interesting and the village was loosing it sense to be.
In 1937 the area of the Continental Ice Field was declared “National Park”. Since then lots of travelers from all over the world started visiting this place and El Calafate began to offer a better assistant to tourists.
El Calafate takes its name from a typical steppe shrub which in spring has yellow flowers with little violet fruit.
The weather in this region is arid and cold, with an overage of -2º C in winter and 18º C in summer, rains are spare, mostly during autumn and not more than 300 mm per year.
Los Glaciares National Park was created in 1937 to preserve the natural wonders of this part of the Austral Patagonian Andes.
It has 6000 km2 from which a part of them belongs to the National Reserve and the other three parts to the Park itself. The National Park embraces a zone with weather changes and different landscapes unique in the world.
Because of the interest in it landscape on a hand and the vegetation and animals in danger of extinction on the other, the UNESCO declared it in 1981 Humanity Natural Inheritance.