Run your hand along the bark and it is cold to the touch, even in summer - smooth, peeling, the color of cinnamon and dried blood. These are the arrayanes, a flowering myrtle so unusual that Argentina carved a whole national park out of a larger one just to protect them. Los Arrayanes National Park occupies the Quetrihué Peninsula, a finger of land reaching into Lake Nahuel Huapi, where thousands of these trees crowd together so densely they leave little room for anything else. The grove is one of the few mature arrayán forests left on Earth.
For decades this peninsula was simply a corner of the vast Nahuel Huapi National Park, easy to overlook among so many lakes and peaks. In 1971 that changed: authorities carved out a 1,750-hectare section and made it a park in its own right, a deliberate act to focus attention and resources on saving one of the last great arrayán stands. The trees themselves justify the gesture. The signature grove covers only about 20 hectares at the peninsula's southern tip, yet many of its arrayanes are around three centuries old, and some have stood for more than 600 years - older than the nation that protects them, older than most of the cities of South America.
Luma apiculata is its scientific name, and everything about it feels slightly otherworldly. The cinnamon-red bark stays cool because it is rich in tannins; when it flakes away it reveals pale, ghostly patches beneath, so a grove of arrayanes seems dappled and luminous even in shade. In summer the trees bloom white and later set a dark fruit, prized in both Chile and Argentina and beloved by bees for honey. The wood is dense, the canopy low and twisting. Walk into a thick arrayán forest and the ordinary rules of a woodland seem suspended - the trunks lean and braid together, the light goes soft and coppery, and the silence has a held-breath quality all its own.
A persistent local story claims Walt Disney wandered this forest and found in it the look of the woodland in his 1942 film Bambi - there is even a cabin known as Bambi's House along the trail. It is a lovely tale, and it is not true. Disney's South American trip came in early 1941, but the forest of Bambi was already designed and on the drawing board before he ever sailed south, and he never visited the peninsula. The animators drew on gaucho culture and Brazilian color, not Patagonian myrtle. The legend survives anyway, because the resemblance is real and the wish behind it is understandable: a place this enchanted feels like it ought to have inspired something.
The wildlife here runs to the miniature and the secretive. The pudú, one of the world's smallest deer, slips through the undergrowth, while the larger huemul keeps to country nearer Villa la Angostura. There are foxes, and the elusive monito del monte - despite its name not a monkey but a tiny nocturnal marsupial, a living relative of the opossum that you will almost certainly never see by daylight. Overhead the sky belongs to more than 100 bird species, crowned by the Andean condor riding thermals on three-meter wings. To protect the trees' fragile roots, visitors keep to elevated wooden walkways through the grove - a discipline that turns a simple walk into something closer to a pilgrimage.
Los Arrayanes National Park runs down the Quetrihué Peninsula into Lake Nahuel Huapi, with the headland tip near 40.83 degrees south, 71.62 degrees west, in Neuquén Province. From the air the long narrow forested peninsula pointing south into the lake is the defining feature, with the town of Villa la Angostura at its base and the bulk of Nahuel Huapi National Park beyond. The nearest commercial airport is San Carlos de Bariloche (Teniente Luis Candelaria, ICAO SAZS), about 80 km to the south across the lake. Recommended viewing altitude is 3,000-6,000 ft to trace the peninsula's shape; the surrounding water makes a calm reference, but Andean winds off the western peaks can stir sudden chop and low cloud.