Qualla: Lake Colhué Huapi

Lake Colhué Huapi: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Satellites watch it disappear. From orbit, NASA has photographed Lake Colhué Huapi again and again, not as a lake but as a beige and brown smear bleeding plumes of dust eastward over the San Jorge Gulf and into the Atlantic. On the ground, the loss is more intimate: houses half-buried in sand, abandoned fishing boats, ranches swallowed by advancing dunes. In central Chubut, where this shallow water once spread across more than 50,000 hectares, the lake bed has become a Patagonian Sahara. Colhué Huapi is one of the rare places where you can stand inside a disaster still unfolding, on the floor of a lake that drained within living memory.

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Lake Colhué Huapi: The Lake of the Brown Island

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name comes from Mapudungun, the Mapuche language. Colhué means a red or reddish place, and Huapi means island, so the lake may have been named for one of its rocky islets or for the clay-brown color of its water. For most of its history it was a true lake, shallow but enormou...

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Lake Colhué Huapi: The Water Tiger

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Tehuelche people, who knew this lake long before European settlers arrived, told of a creature in its waters they called the lemisch, the water tiger. They described it as a supernatural beast, nocturnal and bellowing, terrifying and, in their accounts, immune even to rifle f...

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Lake Colhué Huapi: When the Lake Was Green

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It is hard to picture now, but Colhué Huapi was once an oasis. Through the first half of the twentieth century the land around it was green with farms, fruit trees, and plantations, productive enough that local estancias made cheese for sale. Scientists studying the lake in the 1...

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Lake Colhué Huapi: A Lake Drained by Drought and Hand

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The drying has been blamed on both nature and people. A long regional drought since around 2000 cut the water, but so did human action: the diversion of the Senguerr River through embankments to irrigate crops, leaving little to reach the lake. By 2017 Colhué Huapi had dried almo...

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