Santa Cruz (El Calafate / Patagonia)
Some sights you watch, and some you feel in your chest. The Perito Moreno Glacier is the second kind. Deep in the far south of Patagonia, within Los Glaciares National Park, a river of ice the size of a city flows down from the southern ice field and meets the milky water of Lago Argentino. It is one of the few great glaciers in the world that is still advancing, creeping forward a couple of meters a day, and standing before it you are watching a living thing on a scale that is hard to hold in the mind.
What stops every traveler in their tracks is the face. The glacier ends in a wall of blue and white ice nearly five kilometers wide and rising some sixty meters above the lake, a sheer cliff seamed with deep cracks and pillars that glow an impossible electric blue. Every so often the whole place falls quiet, and then a slab the size of a building shears off the front and crashes into the water with a sound like thunder, sending up a wave and a cloud of spray. That cracking and calving can happen at any moment, so the glacier keeps you watching and waiting, camera ready.
The wonderful thing about Perito Moreno is how close it lets you get. A network of steel boardwalks fans out across the rocky headland that faces the glacier head-on, carrying you to viewpoints at every height so the great wall fills your whole field of view. Boats slip across the lake to the very foot of the ice, dwarfed beneath the cliffs, and for the adventurous there are guided treks that strap crampons to your boots and lead you out onto the surface of the glacier itself, among its blue pools and crevasses. However you choose to meet it, we fold the day neatly into your wider Patagonian journey.
