Qualla: Reserva Provincial La Payunia

Reserva Provincial La Payunia: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fernando Arcos, CC BY-SA 3.0. Stand anywhere in La Payunia and you are surrounded by volcanoes - not one or two on the horizon, but hundreds. This stretch of southern Mendoza Province holds more than eight hundred volcanic cones, one of the highest densities of volcanoes found anywhere on the planet, scattered across 4,500 square kilometers of Patagonian steppe roughly 160 kilometers from the town of Malargue. The ground itself records the eruptions: in places, fallen volcanic ash has stained the plains a deep black, the Pampas Negras, the Black Pampas. Argentina declared the area a provincial reserve in 1988, but the land had been writing its own history in basalt and cinder for far longer.

Image: Fernando Arcos | CC BY-SA 3.0

Reserva Provincial La Payunia: A Field of Fire

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luis Adrian Crescentino Memoli, CC BY 2.0. The reserve sits in the back-arc of the Andes, where a thinning of the Earth's crust let magma rise again and again across hundreds of thousands of years, building cone after cone instead of one towering peak. The largest are Payun Matru, Payun Liso, and Santa Maria. Payun Matru ...

Image: Luis Adrian Crescentino Memoli | CC BY 2.0

Reserva Provincial La Payunia: Black Pampas, Red Slopes

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit alq666, CC BY-SA 2.0. Color is the first thing the place does to you. Strombolian eruptions blanketed the plains southeast of the cones with dark lapilli, and the wind has since reworked that debris into black dunes that ripple toward the horizon. Against this darkness, oxidized cinder cones glow rust...

Image: alq666 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Reserva Provincial La Payunia: Life on the Lava

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit alq666, CC BY-SA 2.0. Harsh as it looks, the reserve is far from empty. More than seventy animal species have been documented across La Payunia. Andean condors ride the thermals on three-meter wings; Darwin's rhea sprints across the flats, and flamingos gather on the high lakes. Pumas hunt here, along...

Image: alq666 | CC BY-SA 2.0

Reserva Provincial La Payunia: The People Who Stayed

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit alq666, CC BY-SA 2.0. About twenty families live within the reserve, organized as the Cooperativa Payun Matru, and they have built a livelihood out of the wildlife rather than against it. Each year they round up wild guanacos, shear them for their exceptionally fine fleece, and release them back onto ...

Image: alq666 | CC BY-SA 2.0