For most people, Patagonia conjures up images of dramatic mountain ranges draped in glaciers and plains of pampa sweeping endlessly into the horizon. But Patagonia’s Atlantic coast shows another face of this amazing region: a wild coast that’s perfect for wildlife watching. I headed to Peninsula Valdes to find out more, on the look out for whales, penguins, seals and even an occasional armadillo.
Argentina’s Peninsula Valdes is just under two hours by air from Buenos Aires to the main city at Puerto Madryn, but connections from El Calafate to the nearby airport at Trelew means that it’s an easy add on to a hiking trip in Los Glaciares or even Tierra del Fuego.
Most visitors choose like I did to visit in the austral spring and early summer. The reason for this is the peninsula’s main wildlife draw: southern right whales. Every August, the whales are drawn to the sheltered waters of the peninsula to mate and give birth.
October is the month when things really start getting busy. While the first hikers are getting ready to hit the mountain trails further south, the wildlife of Peninsula Valdes is really waking up to the first signs of spring. Right whales can easily be spotted from the beaches, while Magellanic penguins arrive in vast numbers to breed and lay eggs in their burrows. On the beaches, South American sea lions also arrive. Males to stake a claim over territory to fight for their harems of females, while the pups of southern elephant seals have already started to be born.
Come the middle of December, the right whales have returned to their oceanic feeding grounds, but the show continues along the shoreline. Juvenile penguins crowd the beach, while the sea lion colonies swell with the arrival of new pups. Resident orcas patrol along the shore, looking for a meal. In some areas like Puna Norte, they’ve even developed the hunting technique of deliberately beaching themselves at high tide to snatch unwary seals. This is mainly seen late in the season in March and April, so I had to content myself with scanning the horizon for a distinctive dorsal fin.
To explore the region more, I chose not to base myself in Puerto Madryn, but 60 miles (95km) away on the peninsula itself, in the charming village of Puerto Piramides. This has a resident population of just a couple of hundred, but its numbers are swelled considerably every season by the wildlife watching tourists and the Argentinian beachgoers.
Puerto Piramides has five whale watching companies who run daily trips from August until early December. As with all wildlife, the type of whale watching encounter you’ll get is unpredictable, but on a good day you can expect to see plenty of whales in all directions. A code of conduct puts a gentle speed limit on boat operators to avoid disturbing the whales, and no two boats may be at a close observation distance on the same whale.
That said, no one seems to have told the whales about how close they’re allowed to get to you! On more than one occasion our boat had a right whale swim right up to us and under our boat as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Perhaps it was for them, but for those of us on board it was truly a sublime moment to be so close to these extraordinary creatures.
Back on land, I spent the next day visiting Caleta Valdes, an hours’ drive on a rough gravel road from Puerto Piramides to watch wildlife from the shore rather than the sea. The landscape here is wide and empty, and dotted with salt flats until you come to the great cliffs that plunge down to the sea – a big contrast to the gentle beaches of Puerto Piramides.
From the rangers station here it was possible to follow a walkway along the cliffs to watch the elephant seals and sea lions that were hauled up at the base of the cliffs. I was glad to have brought binoculars: a recent rockfall on the cliffs had blocked access to the beach itself.
The wildlife encounters got a lot more close up when I moved from my guesthouse in Puerto Piramides to the tip of the peninsula and booked myself into Estancia Rincón Chico for a couple of nights. This very remote guesthouse offers a very rustic sort of luxury to those who stay there, but one that’s coupled with some truly brilliant wildlife watching.
The great advantage of staying at Rincón Chico is that it offers private access to a great swathe of the peninsula coastline. I set out with my fellow guests with our guide in a vehicle to patrol the shoreline.
First, we visited a beach close to Punta Delgado lighthouse that was home to some of the peninsula’s 55,000 southern elephant seals. This time they weren’t tucked beneath a cliff but hauled up in a spot that was accessible by road. Being in a small group, we were allowed to quietly approach them on foot, and when they were used to our presence, sit in silence on the pebbles to watch them.
There were mostly females and ‘weaner’ pups, the enormous males mostly being at sea until they return to claim their harems during the breeding season. The seals seemed thoroughly uninterested in us and happily snoozed or snuffled around on the beach. It was hard to reconcile their ungainly forms on land to the amazing feats they can achieve at sea – diving to depths of more than a mile by completely collapsing their lungs and reducing their heart rate to just five beats per minute.
After the elephant seals we stopped for a packed lunch in the dunes, sheltered from the wind but with tremendous views over a coast that seemed to stretch out forever. No one said it, but we were all constantly scanning the waters for a view of a tall black dorsal that would tell us that orcas were patrolling the beach. No such luck today, though we all knew we were far too early in the season for the chance of seeing much hunting behaviour.
One species we did see in profusion after we’d eaten however was the Magellanic penguin. North of Caleta Valdes was a beach where I almost worried about treading on them underfoot. Our guide told us that about 300,000 pairs nested here which meant that by the end of the season in March when the juveniles were beginning to fledge there could be well over a million birds here.
Visiting in November meant that the chicks had yet to arrive, so the penguins were concentrating on sitting on their nests and incubating their eggs. Magellanic penguins nest in cosy little burrows tucked into the scrub, so we watched them coming and going from the sea or hanging out on their porches, taking care not to get too close or accidentally block the path on a well-worn penguin trail.
As we drove back to Rincon Chico, herds of guanacos and clusters of emu-like rheas reminded us that you don’t have to purely turn your face to the ocean to see wildlife in Peninsula Valdes. It was another reminder that this peculiar spit of land sticking out into the Atlantic is something of a treasure house – and that Patagonia is always worth exploring beyond its mountains.
