The museum opened on March 17, 1940, as part of the unveiling of the Bariloche Civic Center, a complex the national government built to bring order and grandeur to what was then a remote frontier town. Architect Ernesto de Estrada designed it, working in an alpine style suited to the lake and mountains. The walls rise in polished green tuff quarried from a nearby hill, framed with cypress and the slow-growing native cypress relative called fitzroya, all roofed in slate. A flagstone plaza ties the buildings together. The museum shares this ensemble with the city hall and the Domingo Sarmiento Public Library, and in 1987 the whole Civic Center was declared a National Historic Monument.

Francisco Moreno was a surveyor, naturalist, and explorer who spent the 1870s and 1880s pushing into Patagonia when much of it remained unmapped. Argentines came to call him 'el Perito,' the Expert, for his work on the boundary commission that settled the country's contested border with Chile. The museum follows the intellectual tradition Moreno himself helped found: it was organized in the manner of the great La Plata Museum, the natural history institution he established in 1888. His own exhibit hall honors the donation that created the park, while the broader collections trace the deep natural and human history of the land he spent his life studying.

The galleries reach back through Patagonia's long human story. Fossils and geological specimens fill the natural sciences hall; dioramas and stratigraphy displays illustrate the region's prehistory and its Stone Age cultures. An aboriginal history hall is devoted to the indigenous peoples of the south, the Mapuche, the Selk'nam, the Tehuelche, and the Yámana, including the implements they used to read the stars. The museum does not look away from what followed. A hall on the Conquest of the Desert documents the nineteenth-century military campaigns that drove native peoples from their homelands, displaying the arms and methods of the Argentine armies alongside those of the indigenous leaders who resisted them. It is a hard history, told plainly, of the people who lived here long before the surveyors arrived.

One hall traces Bariloche itself, from its founding in 1885 as a small settlement on the lake to its deliberate promotion as a resort beginning around 1905. The Civic Center was part of that transformation, a piece of carefully built civic theater meant to give a frontier outpost the dignity of a European spa town. It worked. Bariloche became one of Argentina's most beloved destinations, and the museum at its center remains the place to understand how a remote shore on Lake Nahuel Huapi became a national park, a city, and a symbol, all of it tracing back to one man's decision to give his land away.