Hola todos! This is a short blog post to give the Patagonia Museum of Bariloche a bit of a spotlight as it’s a good place to give a good all round intro/overview of Patagonia.
Firstly as you can probably understand from the sheer distances between towns and cities here Patagonia is a vast region which pretty much makes up the entire southern halves of Argentina and Chile, while it is a beautiful landscape near the Andes much of it is a harsh steppe land which does not get much annual rainfall on the Argentine side where much of the Chilean side is green and fertile getting water from clouds coming off the Pacific Ocean. These clouds then pass eastwards towards the Andes turning into snow then they speed up as they drop over to the Argentinian side and dissipate over the vast plains meaning further east of the Andes the more dry it gets until you reach the Atlantic coast.
Patagonia has a lot of unique species of wildlife that I was not aware of, among some notables is pumas, different species of birds, armadillos and of course Penguins the further south you get among many other things, all adapting to harsh conditions of the Patagonian Steppe region.
Inside the museum there is also a section on the history of Patagonia, to sum it up briefly while a lot of the history is from the mid 19th century where most modern large scale human settlement took place there have been native tribes living here long before the arrival of the Spanish collectively known as the Mapuche that had been eking out an existence here for thousands of years. In the museum there are lots of collections of primitive tools.
In modern times it focuses on the different waves of European settlers that came here and to Argentina as a whole. There is too much here to cover in this short post but it gives an idea of what to expect to see out here and is pretty interesting. A must do of Bariloche.
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