Baritú became part of Argentina's national park system in 1974, protecting roughly 720 square kilometers of rugged terrain. It holds a distinction no other park in the country can claim: it is the only one that lies entirely within the Yungas, the dense, humid subtropical forest that drapes the eastern Andes, and it is often called Argentina's only truly tropical park. The landscape is all verticality. Steep hillsides wrapped in tropical creepers fall away into ravines, and rivers and streams cascade down the slopes in a near-constant succession of waterfalls. Elevations range from about 400 meters in the lower river valleys to over 2,800 meters on the highest ridges, and within that span the ecosystem shifts dramatically with every change in altitude.

Few places in Argentina hold this much life this intact. The forest shelters jaguars and pumas alongside smaller wildcats, the spotted margay and the lithe jaguarundi. Red brocket deer move through the understory; collared and white-lipped peccaries root through the leaf litter; lowland tapirs, now endangered, pick their way to water. Overhead, more than a hundred bird species fill the canopy, from the Andean condor riding thermals above the ridges to endemics like the red-faced guan and the rufous-throated dipper. Even the reptiles include rarities found almost nowhere else, among them the Andean milk snake and the venomous Andean forest pit viper. Recent camera-trap surveys confirmed jaguars moving through the Baritú–Tariquía corridor that links the park to a reserve across the Bolivian border, sustaining one of the southernmost jaguar populations on Earth.

Within Baritú's modest footprint, conditions swing from one extreme to another depending only on how high you stand. The upper ridges are cool, sometimes sharply so, swept by mountain air. Descend toward the valleys and the world turns hot and humid, the lowland forest steaming under frequent rain. This compression of climates into a small, steep space is what makes the park so biologically rich. Plants and animals adapted to highland chill and to tropical heat live within a short, vertiginous walk of one another, and the rapid drops in elevation that make travel so difficult are the very thing that packs so many habitats into so little ground.

Baritú's remoteness is its greatest asset and its quiet warning. Rapid deforestation across the wider region has steadily eroded the habitat that animals like the tapir and the white-lipped peccary depend on, and the park stands as one of the last well-preserved pockets of Yungas forest in the country. Getting around inside means a 4WD vehicle or your own two feet, and the dry season offers the only realistic window to ford the rivers and reach the park administration. The reward for that effort is rare: a place that has stayed wild not because anyone designed it that way, but because the mountains, the mud, and an international border conspired to keep it so.