In 1767, the Spanish crown granted this land to the colonel who had just expelled the Jesuits from the region, and he called the estate El Rey, the King. Its job was to hold a frontier. Two and a half centuries later the estate is long gone, but the name endures over something no colonial administrator could have foreseen: a 44,000-hectare national park where three entirely different forests stack on top of one another up the flank of the mountains. Start at the bottom among thorn trees and dust, and within a single climb you pass into dripping cloud forest and then into cool stands of fir and alder. El Rey is small enough to feel intimate and varied enough to feel like several countries at once.
The old Finca El Rey was founded as a defensive outpost in 1767, a Spanish foothold on a contested edge of empire. The fortress is long gone, but the land it once guarded became a national park in 1948, among the earlier additions to Argentina's protected lands. The shift says something about how the country came to see this corner of Salta Province: not as a border to defend, but as a transition worth keeping intact. The park straddles the seam where the humid Yungas cloud forests of the western Andes give way to the dry Chaco plains spreading east, which makes it drier and more open than the deep-jungle parks further into the mountains.
Elevation does the work of geography here. The lowest zone is Chaco dry forest, ruled by thorn bushes and tough, slow-growing trees like algarrobo and quebracho, the latter so hard its name means axe-breaker. Climb to around 800 meters and the air thickens into cloud forest, dense and green and threaded with orchids. Higher still, past 1,400 meters, the mountain woodland takes over, with firs and alders standing in cooler, clearer air. Each band has its own residents. Birds, small mammals, and countless insects fill the lower forests, and the puma moves through all of them, the apex predator of a landscape compressed into a few thousand vertical feet.
El Rey is built for exploration on foot. From the visitor center, 11 kilometers inside the park, trails fan out to suit almost any appetite. An easy hour's walk reaches Laguna Los Patitos, a lagoon thick with birdlife and a fine place to sit and watch. Longer routes lead to the Río Popayán, to the forest nature trail at Pozo Verde, and to the Cascada Los Lobitos waterfall. The most demanding, the Chorro de los Loros, is a ten-kilometer hike on foot only, climbing into the higher forest where parrots give the place its name. Several shorter paths can be ridden by bike or driven, but the park rewards those willing to slow down and walk into it.
There are no hotels at El Rey; the nearest town, Las Lajitas, sits 90 kilometers to the east. What there is, instead, is a free and surprisingly well-kept campsite at the visitor center, with drinking water, washing facilities, and fireplaces. Entry to the park costs nothing. The climate is subtropical and forgiving for most of the year, humid and muggy in summer when the rains come, often warm and sunny in winter, though cold snaps and frost can still slip in. Reaching El Rey takes some doing, a long drive on provincial roads with no public transport, but the journey filters the crowds. What remains is a quiet park where you can fall asleep to the sound of a river and wake inside three forests at once.
El Rey National Park sits at roughly 24.70°S, 64.63°W in central-eastern Salta Province, northwestern Argentina, occupying a slightly mountainous pocket where the eastern Andean foothills meet the Chaco plains. Elevations range from the dry-forest floor up through cloud forest near 800 m to mountain woodland above 1,400 m, so a viewing altitude of 8,000–11,000 ft gives good terrain clearance over the surrounding ridges. From the air, the park reads as an island of dense, layered green rising abruptly out of the flatter, paler Chaco scrub to the east, a horseshoe of forested hills enclosing the valley of the Río Popayán. The nearest major airport is Martín Miguel de Güemes International in Salta (ICAO SASA), roughly 100–120 km to the west-northwest. Visibility is generally best in the dry winter months; summer afternoons bring building cumulus and haze over the warm lowlands.