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Llao Llao. So nice they named it twice. In fact, they built it twice. Argentina’s most celebrated hotel, first constructed in 1938 by the legendary Alejandro Bustillo, was a monument to the natural world, a colossus of carved stone, encased inside and out with Patagonian cypress logs and roofed with alerce wood shingle. One architectural critic, so taken by the grandiosity of the design, declared: “It is possible to think it was conceived for that unknown race of beautiful blond people with thick beards and blue eyes who peered from under the brims of three-cornered hats and spoke a language the Spaniards and the Indians could not understand.”

Perched on a perfectly imperious knoll, flanked by the foothills of the cordillera and floating above Lake Moreno, Llao Llao was an instant hit: a bold, iconic diamond on the virgin landscape (that had been freshly minted as Nahuel Huapi National Park), and a glam magnet for Buenos Aires high rollers. Aided by a new rail link to the capital, Llao Llao effectively opened up Argentina to luxury tourism. But a year later it had burned to its base. Immediately the undaunted Bustillo set about recreating the original structure, this time with a concrete façade replacing the timber. And the dream, of luring travelers back to the gateway of The Great South, was reborn.

In the ensuing six decades, Llao Llao (pronounced zshao zshao in Argentina’s Spanish) - from the Mapuche Indian for “sweet sweet,” referring to the edible honeyed fungus found on native coihue trees - has been reinvented several times over. As has the town that it helped fashion: San Carlos de Bariloche. Dubbed the Switzerland of South America, Bariloche, as it is always called, occupies a singular place in the Argentine imagination. For several generations the place has been populated by a continuous stream of settlers from Central Europe. From the seething capital to the flatlands of the Pampas, the very name Bariloche invokes a fairy world of gingerbread cottages, handmade chocolate shops, immense alpine vistas, lush ancient forests and pure glacial lakes. And, to a large part, it’s true.

“In the Austrian Alps you’ll find his wonderful lake that meets a mountain, but then you’ll look around and every fifty feet you’ll see a fence and a little house,” says half-Austrian half-French Emmanuel Burgio, founder of South America travel specialists Blue Parallel. “In Argentina it’s all wild, open space.”

Thanks largely to the financial crisis that shattered Argentina’s economy four years back and transformed South America’s most expensive nation into an overnight garage sale, Bariloche has retooled itself into a top-flight destination. While hotel rates have since started to creep north again, and the five-star market has kept close parity with international tariffs, eating out - and eating well - is still a steal here. Moreover, Bariloche’s fearsomely first-world infrastructure gives it the edge over its Latin neighbors. Plus the surrounding Lake District, where the provinces of Neuquen and Rio Negro kiss the Chilean border, straddles three distinct climate zones and flaunts four full seasons of outdoor fun. No wonder a new wave of boutique properties, rebuilt historic lodges and fresh-footed outfitters is ushering back Argentines and enticing outsiders to the Southern Cone’s ultimate lake-and-mountain resort.

To rise at dawn at Design Suites is a bewildering experience. In that semi-conscious blur of opening my eyes and trying to make sense of the world anew, I am confronted by a wash of pinks and blues. I realize I have swept back the curtains of our mammoth floor-to-ceiling windows the night before precisely to luxuriate in this moment, yet still I am trying to orient the constituent parts of mountain, lake and sky. I just can’t seem to focus; the canvas is too big. Finally, I piece together the impossibly gorgeous vista of Lake Nahuel Huapi and sink back into the pillow, defeated: surely, this is going to be the best thing I see all day.

All I want to do is loll about in within the confines of my hotel bedroom - a monstrously generous dream-loft with nothing to demarcate between lounge, bedroom and jacuzzi zones. But my host for the day, Diego Allolio, has other ideas. A couple of hours later we’re ascending Bariloche’s highest range, Cerro Catedral, by cable car. Come July, these slopes form Argentina’s most happening ski scene (with the possible exception of Las Leñas to the north), but now, in mid-March, as the colors of the southern summer bleed into autumn, we’re practically alone. And damn, the panorama really is worth getting out of bed for.

Looking down from Refugio Lynch, we’re able to appreciate the mighty jeweled jigsaw of Nahuel Huapi, Argentina’s largest, oldest and most popular national park, cradling the tentacled lake of the same name. Skirting the near shore is the nineteen-mile long Avenida Bustillo, the lone paved artery that links the village of Llao Llao with Bariloche, an urban sprawl whose population has doubled in the past ten years to 115,000. In the foreground is the tiny Isla Huemul, where in the 1950s President Peron desperately tried to develop nuclear fission and (thank heavens for him putting a deranged Nazi physicist in charge) failed. In the distance, the fingers of the lake (which at 216 square miles is the same size as Chicago) fade out toward Bariloche’s superluxe baby cousin, the town of Villa La Angostura.

Allolio, co-founder of the adventure outfitter Meridies, is one of a handful of Bariloche-based tour operators writing the latest episode in Argentina’s outdoor saga. “You have to remember, adventure tourism in our country is something new,” Allolio says. “The reason we got into this is because we loved mountains. And then a little down the road we thought: Well, maybe we can make a living from this.” Nowadays, having logged a decade in outdoor education programs in Europe and the U.S., he and his partner Diego Magaldi lead expeditions to Patagonia’s Southern Ice Field and Aconcagua (the highest peak in Argentina, indeed, the Americas), in addition to directing National Park rangers in wilderness emergency management. “We had this dream of coming back and using the skills we’d learned to create something new in Argentina - a new standard, a new mentality,” adds Allolio, who like so many Barilochenses owns an EU passport (in his case, German), though chooses to call the Southern Cone his home. “This is where I want to be. I like the rhythm of the place, I like the imperfections.”

But why the Lake District over, say, Mendoza, Argentina’s archrival in mountain adventure? One reason that I hear over and again during my nine-day stay: a singular opportunity to surf the region’s ever-changing shifts in climate. For within a swath of forty miles one can take in the transitional woodland that sprinkles Bariloche and the central Lakes in thick mountain cypress and totally capricious weather; the Valdivian rainforest in the foothills of the cordillera, cloaking the Chilean border with some of the planet’s fastest-growing trees and ten times the precipitation of the Patagonian steppe; and the semi-desert scrub of the steppe, which extends east from the Rio Limay (windswept middle-of-nowhere horse treks, anyone?).

The following day I am bound for the rainforest in the company of Alejandro Rosales, another trans-global, multi-lingual outfitter, whose company, Extremo Sur, is putting Bariloche back on the adrenaline map. Together with some wisecracking Russians, a pair of Spaniards and my Argentine wife, we take on the whitewater of the Rio Manso - which in English translates as “Mellow River” though whose class-IV rapids turn out to be anything but.

“When I started this in 1991 I had to explain to the travel agents what rafting was,” says Rosales, who pioneered whitewater sports to Argentina. “Nobody knew what I was talking about.” And until a dirt road was hacked through the forest in 2000, his customers had to trudge back to base camp on foot for two hours, soaked through and ravenous. These days Extremo Sur’s provisions are much more of an easy access affair, even though the cordero patagonico (the signature barbequed lamb) must, as ever, be roasted slowly on an open-ground cross-spit for several hours. Served to us on communal hot plates, it’s the kind of meal that makes me abandon my notebook on the first bite - the meat so buttery, so flavorful, so satisfying I almost want to weep.

Wilderness in high style has been Bariloche’s guiding motto since its glory years of the ‘40s and ‘50s, although ever since the native Mapuches were resettled by the military in the 19th century to make way for European colonists, the region has suffered from an acute identity crisis. For some Argentines, it has come to represent the idealized notion of a white, sophisticated First World society - and for others, something altogether more sinister.

Following World War II, Argentina became a notorious refuge for fugitive Nazis and, according to archival material only recently made available, their vast, laundered riches - facilitated by the Perons, Swiss banks and the Vatican. Beyond Buenos Aires, their principal asylum was the Lakes, to where Gestapo leader Adolf Eichmann fled and was later abducted by Mossad agents, before being hanged in Israel in 1962. More recently, the hotelier and director of Bariloche’s German-Argentine School, Erich Priebke, was extradited to Italy and subsequently convicted of crimes against humanity.

In addition to its shadowy Eurocentric legacy, the Lakes’ commercial muscle has been threatened over the years by intermittent installments of Latin drama. In the ‘70s, as Argentina slipped deeper into recession, corruption and military repression, the government-owned Llao Llao started to lose money - a result of extending one too many crony comps, as concierge Roberto Lennon puts it. Then, in 1978, amid the country’s so-called Dirty War, in which tens of thousands of Argentines were killed or “disappeared,” the hotel closed. Those dark years of the ‘80s - that bore a brutal military dictatorship, a disastrous invasion of the Falklands, civil unrest and hyperinflation - desiccated the Lakes’ tourism. Four-star properties, starved for business, were two-star fleapits except in name. Desperate to survive, Bariloche recast itself as a cheapo summer escape for high-schoolers, while grown-ups were baited by the direst of mass-market packages.

“The big travel companies all sold this one bus tour that would take forty people around the lakes for a day with some guy making lousy jokes on the microphone,” says Hebe Cafaterra of Lihue Expeditions, an upscale Buenos Aires agency. “And that was your only option.” More critically, by the ‘90s the nation had virtually priced itself out of Latin America. With the Argentine peso pegged one-to-one with the U.S. dollar, Patagonia for visitors meant only Chile, while well-off Argentines found it more economical to take luxury vacations in Miami or Madrid, Rome or Paris.

But then, in fits and starts, an exodus of young, independent outfitters from Buenos Aires began to fashion Bariloche into the nation’s adventure playground. As for the hoteliers, the ones still left swimming were mostly those who had maintained a model benchmark over and above the sea of mediocrity. And, after a fifteen-year sleep - in which weeds sprouted through its abandoned, looted interiors - the Lakes’ grande dame reopened under private ownership as Llao Llao Hotel & Resort. (Despite a few early missteps, the place has even reclaimed the magic of yesteryear, re-emerging as one of the great big hotels of the world.) With the peso’s dramatic devaluation at the close of 2001, the money came rolling in to the Lake District once again.

“Argentina, it’s complex,” says Franco Lachetti, the Italian proprietor of Hosteria Isla Victoria. “It’s like a beautiful tree - so many branches, all these different people, all these different races braving the elements together. And when the wind comes and the tree falls, the roots grow back. We’re always growing back.” Lachetti should know: his brainchild, one of the region’s newly re-incarnated hotels, represents the most remarkable chapter in the rebirth of the Lakes.

Built in 1946, the first hosteria swiftly rose to prominence as Argentina’s ultimate honeymoon retreat: a super-exclusive seven-room lodge enfolded by the waters of Nahuel Huapi. But in 1982 it went the way of Llao Llao, and was completely consumed by a blaze - except that Victoria’s phoenix took 20 years to rise. For a full decade the scorched ruins lay derelict, hopelessly administered by a beleaguered Parks commission that had changed presidents three times in as many years. When the plot was finally relinquished for sale the nightmare of re-construction really began: “It was difficult to know who to deal with half the time,” explains Franco, who found himself bound by a three-way tussle over Victoria - between the National Park, and the bordering provinces of Neuquen and Rio Negro. But what nearly sank the project entirely was the sudden, accidental death of the chief architect - Franco’s eldest son.

Not until 2002 did the new property open its doors, based on the same design and on the same site as its predecessor, but this time with 22 sumptuous rooms, a spa and a compelling menu of outdoor adventures (that includes sea-kayaking, horseback riding). Prior to my arrival, however, I am bent upon hating Hosteria Isla Victoria. For one thing, it’s an all-inclusive, which always gives me the shudders - you don’t have to worry about money once you’re here, sir, just sit back while we fleece you with middling food, rooms and service. Also, like a number of post-crisis enterprises (including the national air carrier Aerolineas Argentinas), the place operates an economic apartheid, charging one tariff for foreigners and another for domestic customers. In short, for $570 per night (the amount of a decent monthly salary in Argentina), I am expecting miracles.

Yet upon approach (a half-hour boat shuttle from Llao Llao), I peer up at the wooden lodge, anchored high above a sheer bluff, and am instantly seized by a sort of kiddie euphoria. For there is, I realize, one thing I just can’t fight: Sitting in the heart of Argentina’s most fabled lake, Isla Victoria is an emerald sliver of land half the size of Manhattan, swathed in virgin forest and permanently occupied by five working families. For the next three days I will have a twelve-mile-long island wilderness all to myself - but for a few residents, my wife, a dozen other guests and nine hundred head of deer.

Once in our lakefront room, it becomes clear what sort of isolation-in-nature experience we’re in for. I gaze at a horizon of receding blues and greens, and save for the far away lights of Llao Llao, the view seems to summon a recreated earth, stripped of all civilization. The bedroom itself is stuffed with a crazy amount of fluffy pillows - yet still, the lounging will have to wait. Downstairs waits our equestrian guide, third-generation islander Marcos Pagarde.

Marcos saddles up the horses and leads us through canopied pathways of coihue, alerce and ponderosa pine. The woods beckon the horsebacked traveler to a multi-sensory experience: the inimitable whiff of the equine commingles with the cologne of calafate berries; the creak of towering timber competes with the mating squawk of the pudu (the world’s smallest deer); dappled midday sun dances through leaves while we and our horses scuff past thorny rosa mosceta bushes. Eventually we emerge through a clearing that fans out toward a secluded bay, and our sybaritic journey is complete: Awaiting us is another guide, Hernan, with a handsome platter of smoked trout, eggplant salad and cold cuts, including wild boar.

The hosteria makes a lot of noise about its bilingual guides even though Marcos doesn’t speak a word of English. Yet at the age of 25, he is still one of Victoria’s treasures. Over lunch, Marcos explains how his grandfather, Aurelio Pagarde, settled here in 1939, working for the nascent Parks service; how he wound up naming most of the island’s hills and pathways, beaches and lagoons; how he came to host such visitors as President Eisenhower and the Shah of Iran. Yet what Marcos keeps coming back to is the simplicity of island life - growing up without access to modern comforts, he lived off the deer he hunted with his father. His mother tended a vegetable plot and made jam from fruit picked in the orchard.

The family would only venture back to the mainland for monthly provisions and the occasional medical emergency - such as when Marcos accidentally hacked off his brother’s finger while chopping wood. Surrendering to the idea that a secondary school might come in handy for young Marcos, the family migrated to Bariloche for ten years. Yet despite the town’s enchanting hinterland, it had people - as well as shops and houses and cars and restaurants. And it wasn’t home. “We came back to Victoria every weekend,” says Marcos. And what did he yearn for most? Without missing a beat he responds: “La tranquilidad.”

Maintaining tranquillity is the classic conundrum now facing the Lakes at large. For one perfectly dreamy afternoon we took to Nahuel Huapi on a state-of-the-art ketch called La Bonita. Though horrendously overpriced, the excursion revealed the lake to be completely free of any other vessel as far as the eye could see. And for two days we holed up at Aldebaran, a spectacular new boutique property at the end of a dirt track on the San Pedro Peninsula, which, despite its fourteen-mile proximity to Bariloche, felt like a backwoods outpost - parts of the area are still without gas and even the hotel itself was awaiting a phone line during my stay. “Alabama in the 1800s,” as Aldebaran’s owner chose to describe it.

Marred by meteoric growth and myopic town planning, Bariloche itself, however, has long passed the point of no return - a victim of its own success among big city escapees. Nowadays Argentina’s smart set is retreating to the exclusive enclave of Villa La Angostura on Nahuel Huapi’s northern shore. Since the fifty-mile route from Bariloche was paved a decade ago, La Villa, as it’s known, has seen a proliferation of luxury lakeside hotels and cabañas. Martin Zorreguieta, brother to Princess Maxima of the Netherlands, recently opened a fusion bistro here. And the fact that Ted Turner and Planet Hollywood honcho Joe Lewis have moved in hasn’t hurt property prices either. Yet the population remains a tenth of Bariloche’s. In addition, new construction is controlled by strict architectural codes stipulating substantial timber usage, and the town center - another Bustillo creation, rendered largely in cypress - retains a marvelous toytown touch, as if Willy Wonka’s desires had turned to wood instead of concrete.

La Villa’s principal attraction is its natural history: Bathed in the electric greenery of the transition zone, it stands at the threshold of two elysian experiences. One is the Ruta de los Siete Lagos (Seven Lakes Route), a partially paved road snaking northwards from Lake Nahuel Huapi along a pearl necklace of smaller lakes, to San Martin de los Andes. The second is Parque Nacional Arrayanes - the island park within Nahuel Huapi National Park - whose land access is afforded only by the isthmus extending from the town’s southern fringe, and which harbors the world’s only forest of arrayan (myrtle) trees.

Such descriptions about the park’s arboreal wealth didn’t mean much to me either - until I got on a mountain bike and battled the eight bone-shaking miles to the tip of Quetrihue Peninsula. The getting there is savage stuff, in the very best sense - weaving through dense woodland, up-and-down dale, barreling over swollen roots, swerving around dangling branches, toting the bike over fallen trees. But when we finally near the end, the stand of coihues recedes and suddenly everything turns to swirls of cinnamon and cream. It is here, locals love boasting, that Walt Disney was inspired to create Bambi - and you can see why: The arrayan trees look like they were transplanted from the cartoon. Yet while Hollywood’s most famous animator did visit Neuquen in the 1940s, the basis for the picture is more likely to have been the Maine woods, where Disney dispatched a film crew for seven months’ research. Either way, the arrayan forest - its trees reaching back six hundred years, their peeling trunks so cold and smooth to touch - is magical.

With no intention of biking back to La Villa, we sling the frames onto the day’s last ferryboat, which shuttles our aching, mud-splattered bodies across the sound to our final night’s lodgings. Crowning its own serene bay, Las Balsas has a garden lawn that falls like velvet down to a private pier. Inside, the rooms are a little too Laura Ashley for my taste, and the entire property smells like an over-perfumed grandmother. Yet as Argentina’s only Relais & Chateaux member, Las Balsas has other tricks up its sleeve. In contrast to the bovine monotony that typifies so much Argentine cuisine, the restaurant serves an ingeniously audacious tasting menu - trout comes with quinoa tabbouleh, venison with a sauce of blackcurrants and chocolate, corn soup with a bell pepper sorbet. It’s criminal that chef Pablo Campoy is still awaiting a Michelin star.

It’s not difficult settling in to Las Balsas. After a hot stone massage in what seems more like a cupola temple than a spa treatment room, I join the wife for a dip in one of those indoor-outdoor pools. Nobody else in sight. I slip beneath the surface in the indoor section and emerge the other side of a glass divide in the chill Patagonian air. Together we float out toward the pool’s perimeter. Fresh, quickening raindrops dance on the water. The pool is a decadent 76 degrees, steam curling about the surface and licking itself into the corners of the night. And through the mist I can still just about make out the silhouettes of the towering tree tops. I close my eyes, and in a flash I’m back there: deep, deep into the forest.

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