Nahuelito

Nahuelito is the supposed long-necked animal of Lake Nahuel Huapi, in the Argentine Andes, and one of the few cryptids whose entire biography can be dated. The name is not old: it was attached to the lake's plesiosaur by the Bariloche journalist Carlos Bustos around the 1970s, and it is a Spanish diminutive of the lake itself — nahuel is Mapudungun for jaguar — not of an indigenous creature. The plesiosaur did not come from a witness either: when Clemente Onelli, director of the Buenos Aires zoo, announced in 1922 that he would hunt a mysterious animal in Patagonia, he was after Florentino Ameghino's surviving giant ground sloth, and on 15 March he told the Associated Press that plesiosaurus was "a pseudonym the newspapers have given it and which has stuck". Nor did the sighting happen here: Martin Sheffield placed it in a shallow lagoon at Hoyo de Epuyén, in Chubut, hundreds of kilometres to the south. Nahuel Huapi inherited the monster because the expedition spent three weeks based in Bariloche, and Bariloche sealed it at the February 1923 carnival with a mechanical float. The Mapuche water tradition is real and older, but it is a different one: it is called el Cuero.

Lake Nahuel Huapi had no monster until one was brought to it. To see where it came from you have to start twenty-four years earlier and fifteen hundred kilometres away. In 1898 Francisco P. Moreno brought to La Plata a fragment of mummified mylodon hide recovered from the Cueva del Milodón, in Última Esperanza. The piece sat in the museum barely a week on its way to the Zoological Society of London, and in that gap Florentino Ameghino — by then at odds with Moreno — obtained a scrap and rushed into print. The apparent freshness of the hide struck him as evidence that the animal had died recently: he named it Neomylodon listai and argued that the giant ground sloth was still alive in Patagonia. Europe and Buenos Aires were electrified, and expeditions set out to catch it. None found anything. Ameghino meanwhile kept feeding the story: he wrote of the Jemmich, "which the Tehuelche know very well, but whose accounts have always been taken for fables", and placed it in burrows along the shores of Patagonian lakes. That is where the mutation that explains everything began: blended with indigenous mythology, the land sloth of 1898 gradually became, in the public imagination, an animal with aquatic habits. The second push came in 1922. Clemente Onelli, director of the Buenos Aires Zoological Garden, received a letter from Martin Sheffield, an American settled in the Epuyén area, who said he had seen an animal with a swan-like neck. Onelli was hunting Ameghino's edentate — in the instructions La Nación printed on 24 March he asked his men to look for "an edentate very close to, if not the same as, the Criptoterio doméstico" — but a newspaper subheading did the rest. On 15 March, speaking to the Associated Press, Onelli said it outright: "Plesiosaurus is a pseudonym the newspapers have given it and which has stuck", adding that he believed it was an edentate related to the one Ramón Lista had shot at in 1890. The expedition left Buenos Aires on 23 March. The main party drove out of Neuquén on the 26th and reached Lake Nahuel Huapi on 30 March. And there it stayed for almost three weeks, working sites near Bariloche, among them Lake Correntoso. On 8 April the engineer Emilio Frey was in Buenos Aires on business concerning the creation of the Parque Nacional del Sud, the seed of the future Nahuel Huapi National Park. Only on 17 April did the full commission set out for Hoyo de Epuyén to find Sheffield; it reached the sighting spot on the 20th and met his wife and children, since Sheffield himself was convalescing in a town near Esquel. They searched the shallow lagoon beside the family's hunting post, even using a raft. On Sunday 23 April Frey set off eleven cartridges of dynamite in the water. Nothing surfaced. On the 25th the wire reported from Cholila that the expedition was returning empty-handed, and that same night Onelli explained in Buenos Aires that the lake they had searched was not the one Sheffield had pointed to. Meanwhile the wire services were doing their work. In April 1922 a National Geographic Society bulletin reprinted in dozens of American papers introduced "one of the best known of the Andean Lakes of Argentina, Nahuel Huapi", and closed: "It is in this inter-mountain lake region that scientific expeditions will search for the strange creatures reported to have been seen there." That same month Charles Wellington Furlong published a long feature in Washington's Sunday Star that set the band of Patagonian sightings between 52 degrees south and Lake Nahuel Huapi. The hunt was in Chubut; the name being printed was the lake with hotels. Nor was that an accident: in January 1924 a dispatch datelined Buenos Aires announced that Nahuel Huapi "soon will be opened to comfortable tourist travel", with two Bariloche hotels being improved and weekly excursions about to begin. The monster stayed in Bariloche anyway, for two reasons. First: on 6 April 1922, with the story already circling the globe, the Toronto Globe ran an unsigned piece headed "Local Man Lays Claim To Having Caught Sight Of Gigantic Plesiosaur", in which a Canadian employee recalled that in 1910 he and his son, then living at Nahuel Huapi, had seen a strange animal while sailing on the lake. Second: at the carnival of Monday 12 and Tuesday 13 February 1923 the troupe "El Plesiosauro" paraded through Bariloche. Its ringleader was Primo Capraro, a wealthy sawmill owner, a friend of Onelli's and a member of the same Italian community. On the chassis of a Ford truck, using timber and hessian, they built a giant plesiosaur with mechanical movement; walking alongside were aviators, journalists and "Don Clemente" carrying a syringe, escorted by Capraro himself dressed as Martín Fierro on horseback. Rafael Soriani photographed it on Calle Mitre at the corner of Villegas, opposite the Banco Nación. The Italian-language press in Buenos Aires ran the headline "Il plesiosauro e' catturato". It was mockery, and it worked as advertising. The float was reused at later carnivals until it burned in a fire at the sheds of Capraro's sawmill. Onelli died on 20 October 1924 and the affair went quiet. The name came much later: "Nahuelito" was attached to the lake's plesiosaur by the Bariloche journalist Carlos Bustos, around the 1970s. Forty-eight years after the hunt.

There is nothing of Nahuelito to visit, and that is worth saying first: there is no viewpoint, no interpretation centre and no official excursion devoted to the animal. What can be visited is the whole setting of the case, which is well preserved and open to the public. The lake lies at the heart of Nahuel Huapi National Park, created on 8 April 1934 on land Francisco P. Moreno donated in 1903 and on the plan for the Parque Nacional del Sud that Emilio Frey was pushing through in Buenos Aires on 8 April 1922, while the world believed him out hunting a plesiosaur. The base town is San Carlos de Bariloche (Río Negro); the other gateway, on the northern shore, is Villa La Angostura (Neuquén). Park entry is collected at three points: the Mascardi area, on the road to Cerro Tronador; Puerto Pañuelo, when boarding the trip to the arrayán forest, Isla Victoria or Puerto Blest; and the entrance to the Quetrihué peninsula. The fares published by the national parks administration and checked on 14 August 2026 are 35,000 pesos general admission, 15,000 for Argentine residents, 12,000 for students and 8,000 for provincial residents; local residents, pensioners, children under 7, disabled visitors and one companion, and Malvinas veterans pay nothing. The fare covers the first day and the second is half price at the same gate. Passes can be bought in advance on the park website. As with any price in Argentine pesos, check it again before travelling. The classic boat trip leaves Puerto Pañuelo, next to the Llao Llao hotel, for Isla Victoria and the arrayán forest at Quetrihué; private operators run it and the ticket is separate from park admission. It is the outing that most resembles what Frey and his men did between 30 March and 17 April 1922, and what you see from the deck explains a good deal: a lake of long, deep arms, with submerged trunks, drifting planks and a surface the westerly wind lifts into short dark crests. One place does hold the file: the Museo de la Patagonia "Francisco P. Moreno", in the east wing of the Centro Cívico in Bariloche, run by the park itself. It keeps Frey's 1922 letters to Onelli and the Rafael Soriani photographic collection, including the image of the plesiosaur float on Calle Mitre. They are not on permanent display: to consult them you must approach the institution. Park headquarters is at Av. San Martín 24, Bariloche, telephone +54 294 442-3111. A practical warning: this is a glacial lake with very cold water, strong sudden winds and shores of loose shingle. Conditions change fast in the afternoon: check the park's daily bulletin before boating or walking, and respect summer fire closures.