Borders, Resource Extraction, and the Early Conservation Movement in Patagonia, Argentina

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Abstract

The city of San Carlos de Bariloche lies at the bureaucratic heart of Nahuel Huapi National Park in the Patagonian region of Argentina. Today, the city’s tourism industry thrives in large part thanks to the rich natural resources that surround it, offering a seasonal mix of skiing, trekking, climbing, sailing, or simply admiring its vast natural landscapes. This paper reviews some of the foundational categories of the early conservation movement that led to the creation of Nahuel Huapi National Park. The institutional history of national parks in Argentina marks the birth of conservation in the country in 1902, when a prominent public figure, Francisco Moreno, donated land for the creation of a national park. This land was right on the boundary with Chile in northern Patagonia, a boundary that resulted from Moreno’s leadership in the border negotiations. In the years that followed, some national authorities lobbied for the creation of a park in Lake Nahuel Huapi in part for the beauty of the landscape. But most prominently, they sought to protect the forests that maintained waterflow into the lake and out its draining river, where a hydroelectric dam could be built. Conservation of forests could lead to energy independence. Although these early projects of dams and parks did not materialize, they do shed light on the conservation ethos that animated the creation of the Nahuel Huapi National Park in 1934.

Author

• María de los Ángeles Picone, Boston College