What rose on that empty shore in 1953 was, for a time, unique: the only village in Argentina, and by some accounts the world, devoted to harvesting seaweed. Soriano started with two buildings facing the water and his own children gathering kelp by hand. From that beginning grew a genuine settlement. At its peak the village housed more than four hundred algueros, the seaweed harvesters, along with a school, a church, a police station, workshops, warehouses and a company store. It was a strange industrial outpost stranded in the steppe, surviving entirely on what the cold Atlantic washed up, an economy built on a crop nobody had to plant.

The seaweed made the town, but the wildlife made it famous. Bahía Bustamante sits at the edge of an extraordinary concentration of life: a nature reserve where around four thousand sea lions haul out on the rocks, where colonies of more than fifty thousand penguins crowd the shore, and where twenty-two bird species share the white-sand beaches with a petrified forest of ancient stone trunks. In 2011 The New York Times called the place Argentina's private and secret answer to the Galapagos, and the comparison stuck. Magellanic penguins line the water's edge in their hundreds, fluffy chicks grown nearly as large as their parents, on beaches framed by rust-red rock.

Fashions change, and so do chemistries. As demand for natural colloid faded, the seaweed economy withered, and by the 1990s Bahía Bustamante had dwindled toward a ghost town, its population collapsing to single digits. The 2001 census counted just eleven people, ten of them men. The place might have emptied entirely. Instead, Soriano's descendants found a different harvest in the same scenery. From 2004 the family opened the village to visitors, turning the old harvester settlement into an eco-retreat. By 2011 the population had climbed back to around forty, sustained now by travellers drawn to the very wildness that had always surrounded the kelp beds.

There is no fixed itinerary here, because the sea writes the schedule. What a visitor can do on any given day at Bahía Bustamante depends on the tide and the weather: a low tide opens the rocks for sea lion watching, a calm morning makes the petrified forest walkable, a clear afternoon invites horseback rides across the Patagonian ranch. Birdwatching, hiking, mountain biking, demonstrations of the old seaweed trade, all of it bends to conditions. In 2009 the surrounding waters were folded into the Patagonia Austral Interjurisdictional Coastal Marine Park, formal protection for a coastline that had been preserved, almost by accident, by its sheer remoteness and the patient labour of one seaweed family.