It burned to the ground less than two years after it opened. On the night of October 26, 1939, the original Llao Llao Hotel - a vast confection of Patagonian cypress and logs, barely two years old - went up in flames on its hilltop above the lakes. Most owners would have walked away. Instead, the architect rebuilt the whole thing within a year, this time in reinforced concrete and stone, and the second Llao Llao has stood ever since on its hill between Moreno Lake and Lake Nahuel Huapi, in the Andean foothills outside San Carlos de Bariloche.
The architect was Alejandro Bustillo, and Llao Llao became the defining work of what Argentines came to call the Bariloche Style - alpine forms in local stone and timber, grand but rooted in their mountain setting. His first version, inaugurated in 1938, was almost entirely wood, furnished by the French designer Jean-Michel Frank and the Buenos Aires house of Casa Comte. When fire consumed it the following year, Bustillo did not simply mourn the loss. He learned from it. The 1940 reconstruction traded vulnerable wood cladding for concrete and masonry, and the flammable cypress shingles for Norman roof tiles, working alongside the German landscape architect Hermann Botrich. The result reopened on December 15, 1940, recognizably the same silhouette, but built to last.
Grand hotels are expensive to keep, and Llao Llao did not always have a willing patron. In 1976 it closed entirely, starved of the funds its upkeep demanded. For years the great building stood empty above the lake, and emptiness invited the worst. Thieves stripped what they could carry. Vandals broke what they could reach. The Patagonian weather worked on everything else. A structure conceived as a showcase of national ambition spent the better part of two decades as a hollow monument to neglect - a reminder that even the proudest buildings depend on someone deciding they are worth the trouble.
Rescue came through finance rather than romance. In 1993 the hotel reopened after its ownership passed to CEI Citicorp Holdings, settled against Argentine government bonds. The property company IRSA bought it in 1997 for 13.3 million dollars, later selling half its stake to the Sutton Group. Money, it turned out, was exactly what the place had been missing. In 1999 Llao Llao joined The Leading Hotels of the World and began collecting prizes, including recognition that year as the best hotel and resort in the Argentine interior. The hill that had stood silent now hummed again with guests, staff, and the small machinery of luxury.
A building this dramatic deserves a soundtrack, and Llao Llao supplies one each year. The hotel hosts Semana Musical Llao Llao, an annual festival of classical music that fills its rooms with chamber works and recitals against a backdrop of forest, water, and snow-streaked peaks. There is a particular pleasure in hearing a string quartet while the light fails over Lake Nahuel Huapi, the Andes turning from gold to violet beyond the windows. The setting does half the work. The musicians do the rest. Few concert halls can claim a view like this one - and fewer still rose from their own ashes to provide it.
The Llao Llao Hotel sits at 41.06 degrees south, 71.53 degrees west, on a forested hill on the Llao Llao peninsula between Moreno Lake and Lake Nahuel Huapi, roughly 25 km west of San Carlos de Bariloche. From the air the cream-walled building with its red-tiled roofs stands out sharply against dark forest and blue water, with the Catedral massif rising to the south. The nearest airport is San Carlos de Bariloche (Teniente Luis Candelaria, ICAO SAZS), about 40 km east. Recommended viewing altitude is 3,000-6,000 ft for the hotel-and-lakes composition; mountain weather here changes fast, and the famous Patagonian wind can produce sudden turbulence and low cloud over the peaks.