three days in beautiful bariloche.

We decided to do Bariloche at the recommendation of a good friend, and since we didn’t have time to get down to Ushuaia on this trip, it seemed like the perfect way to get at least a little taste of Patagonia. And we found it to be a little slice of heaven – the people were warm and inviting, the scenery was picturesque, and our hotel was one of my favorite places I’ve ever stayed.

After a bit of back and forth on a couple of options, we finally landed on Lirolay Suites (website here). I could go on for hours on how much I loved this hotel, how beautiful the views were, etc, but a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a few to see for yourself. Note: most of the nice hotels are a bit outside of the actual town of Bariloche, but the hotels will call taxis for you to get into town at any point if you’d like to do that. Otherwise, our excursions all picked us up from our hotel, so we only went into town once or twice while we were there.

We booked 2 different excursions while we were in Bariloche that I would HIGHLY recommend:

Horseback Riding with Carol Jones: this was another recommendation from a friend, and it was SO. MUCH. FUN. Carol picked us up and drove us about 20 minutes from town to her beautiful ranch. We then rode horses around her property for a couple of hours, followed by some delicious mate. It was the perfect way to spend an afternoon (roughly 1-6pm)

Puerto Blest Boat Tour: we wanted to explore the Nahuel Huapi lake region around Bariloche, so after a lot of research, we landed on the Puerto Blest Boat Tour through GetYourGuide. It looks like they no longer offer the exact tour we did, but this appears to be closest (though ours was way less expensive, so I’d look around if you’re going to do something like this). We spent a good bit of time on the boat to the lake, then had time to explore the trails and waterfalls around the lake before heading back. The scenery was absolutely breathtaking, so I’d highly recommend doing some sort of Nahuel Huapi/Seven Lakes Tour.