The hotel was the creation of a company tied to the Buenos Aires and Pacific Railway, built in 1938 along Provincial Route 220 by the banks of the Atuel, at an altitude of about 2,180 metres. Its draw was the thermal water - sulfur springs running down from the Overo Volcano, keeping the pools warm and full year-round, even as snow gathered on the peaks above. For a time it was a fashionable place to be, an outpost of comfort set improbably high in the cordillera. Reaching it meant a long haul into thin air, but the reward was a hot bath under an enormous Andean sky.

The glamour did not last. After 1953 the hotel was abandoned, and although a few caretakers lingered on for a while, eventually even they left. The Andes reclaimed it on their own terms. Without a roof or repair, the building surrendered to the seasons - frost prying at the masonry, wind scouring the rooms, snow filling the spaces where guests once gathered. What remains is a cluster of fallen stone walls and the springs that never stopped flowing. The hot bath endures, natural and free now, almost 2,500 metres up; visitors who reach it are reminded that the reason anyone built here in the first place was the heat rising from the ground.

The hotel sits in the shadow of Cerro Sosneado, a 5,189-metre peak that is the southernmost summit in the Americas to exceed 5,000 metres. But the place is best known today for something that happened roughly 21 kilometres away, deeper in the mountains. On 13 October 1972, an aircraft carrying a Uruguayan rugby team and their companions from Montevideo toward Santiago crashed high in the Andes. Of the 45 people aboard, many died in the impact or the freezing days that followed. The survivors endured 72 days at the crash site, facing avalanche, exposure and starvation, and to stay alive they made an agonizing choice none of them ever stopped reckoning with.

Rescue came only because two of the survivors, Nando Parrado and Roberto Canessa, refused to wait for it. In mid-December they set out on foot across the peaks with almost nothing, climbing and descending for days through terrain that should have killed them, until they came upon a Chilean herdsman, Sergio Catalán, across a river. He carried their message to the authorities, and on 22 and 23 December the last fourteen survivors were lifted off the mountain. The ruined hotel, the nearest standing structure to that valley, has become a waypoint on the pilgrimage to the crash site and the memorial nearby - a place where travelers pause before walking into country that tested the limits of human endurance, and where ordinary people found a strength that still astonishes.