Any traveller to Argentinian Patagonia quickly becomes familiar with the name Perito Moreno. It’s the name of one of the region’s most celebrated landmarks, the epic Perito Moreno Glacier in Los Glaciares National Park, which can be explored in a host of ways, from boat trips along its frozen cliffs to ice-hiking on its back. However, not so many foreign visitors are aware of the story behind how the glacier got its name. Let us introduce you to the explorer whose name has been immortalised in ice, and in many ways can be described as the father of modern Patagonia.
Early Patagonian travels
The man known as ‘Perito’ Moreno was not born with that name. He was Francisco Pascaio Moreno, born in Buenos Aires in 1852 at a time when Patagonia was little more than an empty space on the map. He grew up with a love of nature and fossils, and at the age of 21, he rejected the life planned for him at his father’s insurance company, and instead set out on a series of travels in southern Argentina. By 1874 he had reached as far south of the mouth of the Santa Cruz river on the Patagonian coast, 179 miles (275 km) due east of what would become the modern city of El Calafate, in a region he was destined to know intimately.
Moreno’s next set of travels took him to northwest Patagonia. In 1875 he became the first Argentinian to set eyes on Lake Nahuel Huapi, in a land that was then dominated by the Mapuche people. Contrary to some traditions, the city of Bariloche on its shores wasn’t founded by Moreno (its name comes from the Mapuche word vuriloche, for the people already living in the mountains there), but he was certainly the first to raise the Argentinian flag there in 1876.
The following year, with a fellow explorer on leave from the navy, Carlos Moyano, he sailed up the Santa Cruz river. While exploring the many rivers that threaded through the region, on March 4 1877 they became the first Argentinians to set eyes on a towering peak the local Tehuelche people called Chaltén, meaning ‘peak of fire’. Moreno named it Mount Fitzroy instead, though the original name still lives on in the modern town and hiking mecca that sits in its shadow today. From here, they continued to the shores of a huge body of water that they named Lago Argentino. Ironically, he never set eyes on Perito Moreno Glacier that calves into its waters, but the spot where they raised the flag, called Punta Banderas, is where boat trips depart from to visit it today.
Mapping Patagonia
Moreno spent much of the next ten years in the saddle or in boats exploring Patagonia, but he did it for more than just personal gratification. Whenever he raised the flag, he wanted to encourage the rest of Argentina to see Patagonia as a place to be not just explored but developed. A brief spell when he was held hostage by a band of Tehuelche on the Patagonian pampa did nothing to dispel this (the events around his capture and escape were recreated in the gripping 2016 gaucho western Fuga de la Patagonia or ‘Escape from Patagonia’). In keeping with the cultural mores of the time, Moreno saw the future of indigenous people as farmers under a new civilising imperative of education and employment, and he stood against the military policy of extermination that was sweeping across much of Patagonia at the time.
Moreno was keen to put his knowledge to use for the national good. In 1884 he donated his extensive natural history and ethnography collection to the nation, helping found the Museo de la Plata in Buenos Aires, where he served as its director for nearly 20 years,
His keen understanding of the watershed and geology of the Patagonian Andes, and which rivers and lakes flowed east and west along the mountains was perhaps even more vital to the national interest. In the 1890s he played a key role in the mapping commission that set the long-disputed southern border between Argentina and Chile – and even helped direct the placing of the boundary markers on the ground.
Celebrated – then forgotten?
For this service, in 1897 the Argentinian government gave him the title ‘Perito’, an honorific that roughly translates as ‘expert’. Six years later, they followed this up by gifting him 175 square miles (453 square kilometres) of land around Lake Nahuel Huapi. Moreno almost immediately returned a parcel of that land to the state, on the proviso that it should form the nucleus of a new national park system. Thanks to him, Nahuel Huapi National Park in the Argentinian Lake District became South America’s first national park.
In his later years, Moreno founded the Boy Scouts Association of Argentina, and acted as a guide around Patagonia to the former US Presented Theodore Roosevelt – another great advocate of national parks.
However, for all his national acclaim and scientific and geographical achievements, Moreno never met with success on the financial front. When he died in 1919 at the age of 67 he was living on the edge of poverty. One of his final entries in his diary lamented that through his mapping work he had given Argentina thousands of leagues but he was now left with barely enough land in which to bury his ashes. He was buried in the famous Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, but later his remains were interred on Isla Centinela, a small island on Lake Nahuel Huapi, where he had first found fame. Travellers today taking the Cruce Andino ferry route between Bariloche and Puerto Varas should listen for the horn that the boat on the lake sounds every time it passes his grave.
Moreno’s legacy lives on elsewhere. In 1937, Argentina declared the creation of Perito Moreno National Park in Patagonia, in a wild mountainous area north of Lago Argentino on the border with Chile. In the same year, Los Glaciares National Park was also created. At its heart are the two landmarks that are forever associated with his name: Mount Fitzroy and of course, Perito Moreno Glacier. Although he never saw it in person, he did at least have the honour of having his name given to it in 1899. It was his surveying work after all that helped designate this part of Patagonia as belonging to Argentina rather than Chile. And that’s definitely something to celebrate should you find yourself gazing up at its giant ice cliffs or strapping on crampons to hike over its frozen mass.
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