The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders in Argentina
14 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful natural wonders in Argentina are Aconcagua, Mount Fitz Roy and Cueva de las Manos. The list covers 14 natural wonders. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Argentina stretches along the eastern flank of the Andes for more than three thousand kilometres, and its landforms change with every degree of latitude. In the subtropical north-west, the dry Andean valleys expose sedimentary layers stained by minerals into bands of red, green, violet and ochre. In the middle runs the highest section of the range, crowned by Aconcagua. In Patagonia, the Southern Patagonian Ice Field feeds glaciers into turquoise lakes beneath granite spires.
Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside Asia, and Lanín rises as a lone snow-covered volcano on the Andean frontier with Chile. Near El Chaltén, Mount Fitz Roy and Cerro Torre form some of the hardest and most recognisable climbing peaks in the world, and in Los Glaciares National Park the Perito Moreno Glacier ends in a wall of ice above Lago Argentino. Far from the ice, the canyon of the Río Pinturas shelters Cueva de las Manos, its walls covered with stencilled hands thousands of years old.
The north-west brings colour. In Jujuy, the Serranía de Hornocal folds its ridges into a zigzag of many-coloured strata, the Cerro de los Siete Colores rises behind the village of Purmamarca, and the Quebrada de Humahuaca has served as a route through the mountains for some ten thousand years. Nearby, Salinas Grandes spreads a white salt crust over the high plateau, the Quebrada de las Conchas carves red sandstone into fantastic shapes, and Puente del Inca spans a mountain river with a natural bridge tinted by mineral springs.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aconcagua | Mountain | |
| 2 | Mount Fitz Roy | Summit | |
| 3 | Cueva de las Manos | Cave | ✓ |
| 4 | Lanín | Volcano | |
| 5 | Perito Moreno Glacier | Glacier | |
| 6 | Cerro Torre | Summit | |
| 7 | Serranía de Hornocal | Mountain | |
| 8 | Quebrada de Humahuaca | Canyon | ✓ |
| 9 | Puente del Inca | Natural arch | |
| 10 | Salinas Grandes | Salt flat | |
| 11 | Quebrada de las Conchas | Canyon | |
| 12 | Cerro de los Siete Colores | Mountain | |
| 13 | Campo de Piedra Pómez | Rock formation | |
| 14 | Cono de Arita | Mountain |
01 Aconcagua
Argentina32.653° S 70.012° W
Image by magicaltravelling from Pixabay For mountaineers its appeal is that the normal route from the north is not technically difficult: no ropes or ice climbing are strictly needed. The difficulty is altitude. At the summit, air pressure is about 40 percent of sea level, most climbers suffer from altitude sickness to some degree, and around three people die on the mountain in an average year. Only an estimated 30 to 40 percent of those who set out reach the top.
Did you know? A nine-year-old boy reached the summit in 2013, while the oldest recorded summiter was 87.
02 Mount Fitz Roy
Monte Fitz Roy
Argentina49.271° S 73.043° W
Prissantenbär · Public domain The mountain's reputation among climbers is as severe as its looks. It was first climbed on 2 February 1952 by the French alpinists Lionel Terray and Guido Magnone, by the south-east ridge, and it remains a technical ascent of steep rock and ice, made harder by the ferocious Patagonian wind and weather that can shut the summit off for days. Its silhouette is the emblem of the region: it appears on the flag and coat of arms of Santa Cruz Province.
Did you know? The first free solo ascent of the mountain was made by the American climber Dean Potter in 2002.
03 Cueva de las Manos
Argentina47.150° S 70.667° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Mariano · Public domain The pigments were entirely local chemistry: iron oxides for the reds and purples, kaolin clay for white, a mineral called natrojarosite for yellow, manganese oxide for black — a full palette pulled straight out of the surrounding Patagonian rock and soil rather than traded in from anywhere else.
Did you know? There are more than 2,000 hand images in and around the cave.
04 Lanín
Argentina39.637° S 71.503° W
Rodrigo Yuraszeck · CC BY-SA 4.0 Geologically Lanín is the easternmost of a line of three large stratovolcanoes running northwest to southeast, with Quetrupillán in the middle and Villarrica at the far end; the alignment is thought to follow a fault beneath them. It is by far the quietest of the three in historical times. Its oldest known parts may go back to the Late Pliocene or Early Pleistocene, and most of the volcano is built of basalt.
Did you know? In February 2017 instruments detected seismic movements inside the volcano, the first sign of activity ever recorded in historical times.
05 Perito Moreno Glacier
Glaciar Perito Moreno
Argentina50.493° S 73.128° W
Image by Barescar90 from Pixabay That advance creates one of the strangest natural cycles anywhere. As the glacier's front pushes across a narrow point in Lago Argentino, it welds itself to the rock on the far shore and dams the Brazo Rico arm of the lake completely.
Did you know? The glacier first sealed off the Brazo Rico arm of the lake in 1917, the earliest recorded closure.
06 Cerro Torre
Argentina49.291° S 73.099° W
Image by jawajeziorski from Pixabay Its history is a story of ambition and doubt. In 1959 the Italian climber Cesare Maestri announced that he and his partner Toni Egger had reached the summit; Egger was killed by an avalanche on the descent, and the camera said to hold the summit photographs was lost with him. Gaps in the account led many climbers to doubt the ascent.
Did you know? The Compressor Route was only completed to the true summit in 1979, by Jim Bridwell and Steve Brewer, nine years after Maestri turned back below the ice mushroom.
07 Serranía de Hornocal
Argentina · 24.3 km from Humahuaca23.262° S 65.123° W
Image by fedelubomillan from Pixabay The colours come from the rock itself. The range exposes the Yacoraite Formation, a sequence of limestones and sandstones laid down along muddy shores and in shallow seas at the very end of the Cretaceous, about 66 million years ago; the boundary between the age of dinosaurs and the age that followed runs through its upper layers. Across the region the same beds preserve dinosaur footprints, fossil eggs and stromatolites.
Did you know? The Quebrada de Humahuaca below the range is about 155 kilometres long and has been inhabited for at least 10,000 years.
08 Quebrada de Humahuaca
Argentina · 0.1 km from Humahuaca23.200° S 65.349° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Jonny_Joka from Pixabay The most famous views are at the side valleys. At Purmamarca the little adobe village sits at the foot of the Cerro de los Siete Colores, the Hill of Seven Colours, one of Argentina's best-known landscapes. About 25 km from Humahuaca town, the Serranía de Hornocal exposes the banded limestone of the Yacoraite formation along a range that reaches 4,761 metres.
Did you know? The valley floor climbs from about 1,600 metres in the south to around 4,500 metres on the surrounding heights.
09 Puente del Inca
Argentina32.827° S 69.911° W
Image by magicaltravelling from Pixabay Its origin combines ice and hot water. During the ice ages, glaciers left great piles of rubble in the valley; mineral-rich water from the springs seeped through the debris and cemented it into solid rock. The river then cut a channel through the weaker lower layers, leaving the hardened upper part standing as a bridge. Charles Darwin crossed this way in March 1835 and sketched the bridge with its long stalactites hanging from the underside.
Did you know? Engineering studies estimate the arch's factor of safety at 1.5 to 3.0, meaning it can comfortably carry its own weight today.
10 Salinas Grandes
Argentina23.633° S 65.894° W
Bernard Gagnon · CC BY-SA 4.0 The surface is not perfectly smooth. Drying and recrystallisation crack the crust into a mesh of polygons edged with raised ridges of salt, a pattern that runs on to the edge of sight. Here and there small springs, called the "eyes" of the salt flat, open in the crust, and local salt workers have cut long rectangular pools into it, where brine collects and salt crystallises for harvesting.
Did you know? The salt crust averages around 30 centimetres in thickness, though it is thicker in places.
11 Quebrada de las Conchas
Argentina · 31.1 km from Cafayate25.917° S 65.717° W
Image by silkesauer from Pixabay The most striking places are two natural chambers in the cliffs. The Garganta del Diablo, the Devil's Throat, is a narrow cleft that leads into the rock, and the Anfiteatro is a towering, roofless hall of reddish sedimentary walls. Both are thought to mark the paths of former waterfalls from wetter times, when concentrated runoff wore deep channels into the stone.
Did you know? The fossil frogs found near the Morales bridge belong to the pipids, the family that includes today's tongueless clawed frogs.
12 Cerro de los Siete Colores
Argentina23.747° S 65.504° W
Augusto Sarita · CC BY-SA 3.0 The colours record a long and restless geological history. Marine sediments laid down when the region lay under the sea, then lake beds and river deposits, were lifted and buckled by the same tectonic forces that raised the Andes, and fossils in the rock bear witness to those changes.
Did you know? The name Purmamarca is usually traced to Aymara words for desert and town, often rendered as 'village of the virgin land'.
13 Campo de Piedra Pómez
Argentina26.660° S 67.514° W
Rodolfo Pace · CC BY 2.0 The rock is young by geological standards. Around 4,200 years ago Cerro Blanco produced one of the largest eruptions of recent millennia in the central Andes, spreading roughly 170 km³ of ash and pumice over some 500,000 km² — the layer is still about 20 cm thick in Santiago del Estero, 370 km to the east.
Did you know? Geologists have compared the giant wind ripples of the neighbouring valleys with ripple fields on Mars.
14 Cono de Arita
Argentina25.018° S 67.729° W
Ben Stubbs · CC BY 2.0 Its regularity has generated a small mythology. The cone is often described as a volcano that never erupted, or as the most perfect natural cone in the world, and local tradition holds that it served as a ceremonial site before the Inca. Geologists tell a plainer story.
Did you know? Satellite images from NASA's Earth Observing-1 show the yardangs on the salt flat lined up precisely with the prevailing north-westerly winds.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful natural wonders in Argentina?
- On our list, Aconcagua ranks first, followed by Mount Fitz Roy and Cueva de las Manos.
- Why does the Perito Moreno Glacier collapse into the lake?
- The glacier periodically advances across Lago Argentino and seals off the Brazo Rico arm, so water builds up behind the ice. Eventually the pressure tunnels through the ice dam and the arch above it falls, an event that recurs every few years.
- Is Aconcagua a volcano?
- No. Although it contains old volcanic rock, Aconcagua is not a volcano; it was raised by the folding and uplift of the Andes. At 6,961 metres it is the highest mountain in the Americas.
- Why are the hills of Purmamarca so colourful?
- The Cerro de los Siete Colores is made of sedimentary layers laid down in different ages and environments. Iron oxides, copper minerals, clays and limestone give each band its own shade of red, green, purple or cream.
- How many natural wonders are on this list in Argentina?
- The list covers 14 natural wonders.