Your El Calafate Glacier Tour to Perito Moreno
An el calafate glacier tour carries you 80 kilometres west along Lago Argentino to the balcony walkways facing the Perito Moreno glacier, a 5-kilometre-wide wall of ice rising some 70 metres above the water. From the metal passarelas you watch seracs calve into the Canal de los Témpanos while guides explain the Patagonian Ice Field feeding this UNESCO World Heritage landscape. Most el calafate glacier tour tickets pair the boardwalk circuit with a navigation across the channel for a waterline view of the ice front.
Perito Moreno is one of the few glaciers on earth that is not measurably retreating. Its front wall holds roughly 5 kilometres of width and rises about 60 metres above the surface of Lago Argentino, with a further 100-plus metres submerged.
Argentina's Instituto Nacional del Hielo Continental has tracked it since the 1940s. The mass advances toward the Península de Magallanes at speeds near two metres a day, grinding forward while its face collapses in equal measure. Balance, not stillness.
The glacier draws its name from Francisco Pascasio Moreno, the naturalist and surveyor whose nineteenth-century expeditions fixed Argentina's boundary claims in Patagonia. Los Glaciares National Park was established in 1937 and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1981. It covers some 726,000 hectares, drawing ice from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field — the largest continental ice mass outside the polar regions. Forty-seven major glaciers descend from it. Perito Moreno is the most reachable, some 78 kilometres west of El Calafate along Provincial Route 11, which explains why an el calafate glacier tour has become the anchor of nearly every itinerary in Santa Cruz province.
What makes the glacier singular is the rupture. Advancing ice periodically dams the Brazo Rico arm of the lake, cutting it off from the main basin. Water rises behind the wall, sometimes by 20 metres or more, until pressure carves a tunnel through the ice and the arch above it falls. Ruptures were recorded in 2004, 2006, 2012, 2016 and again in the years since, at irregular intervals of roughly two to four years. No calendar governs it.
Today the park manages access through a network of steel and timber balconies on the peninsula, built to distribute weight across fragile lenga forest and to hold visitors at a safe distance from calving ice. Beyond the walkways, licensed operators run el calafate glacier cruise sailings along the southern face, el calafate glacier tour boat crossings from Bajo de las Sombras, and el calafate glacier trekking tour departures that fit crampons for a walk on the ice itself. Various el calafate glacier tour packages combine two or three of these. The park charges a conservation fee of 45,000 ARS per foreign adult, valid for one day, and gates open 08:00–18:00 daily. Ice, lake, forest and moraine remain in the same slow negotiation they have kept for centuries — an el calafate glacier tour tour merely arrives mid-sentence.
8 hr
