“Argentina's Loch Ness Monster, a humped serpent said to break the cold surface of a Patagonian lake.”
Lake Nahuel Huapi is a cold, glacier-fed sheet of water stretching beneath the Andes at Bariloche, and something is said to surface there. Nahuelito — Argentina's answer to Nessie — is described as a giant serpent or a line of humps, ten meters and more of leathery back, occasionally crowned with a long swan-like neck. It is South America's most famous lake cryptid, with a documentary trail older than Loch Ness's.
Reports reached Buenos Aires decades before the modern monster era: zoo director Clemente Onelli was collecting them from 1897, and the plesiosaur-hunting expedition he launched in 1922 made newspapers around the world. A century later the creature remains Bariloche's shadow mascot — photographed badly, explained variously, and stubbornly unaccounted for.
The Legend
The lake had a monster before it had a name for one. Mapuche oral tradition in Patagonia told of dangerous water-beasts, among them the cuero — the 'hide,' a creature like a living cattle-skin said to wrap and drown its prey — reported around these waters long before settler sightings began. When Nahuelito finally surfaced into the newspapers, older Patagonians could say they had been warned.
The modern legend crystallized around the plesiosaur. In an age intoxicated by dinosaur discoveries, a surviving marine reptile in a bottomless Patagonian lake seemed almost plausible, and the descriptions obligingly matched: the humps, the leathery skin, the periscope neck. One small body of water near the claimed sightings is still known as the Laguna del Plesiosaurio — the Plesiosaur's Lagoon.
Documented Sightings
The founding report belongs to George Garrett, manager of a lake company, who around 1910 watched an object he judged five to seven meters long, standing some two meters out of the water, from about 400 meters off. He kept it private until 1922, when he told the Toronto Globe. That same year the American prospector Martin Sheffield wrote to Clemente Onelli of the Buenos Aires Zoo, describing huge tracks and a great unknown animal in a lagoon near Epuyén.
Onelli answered with the famous 1922 expedition, led by zoo superintendent José Cihagi, which searched and found nothing; Scientific American's Leonard Matters concluded that the plesiosaur, 'if it ever existed, appears to have fled to parts unknown.' The file stayed open: the Argentine Navy reportedly tracked an unidentified underwater object for 18 days in 1960, and in 1988 photographs of something off the Bariloche shore ran in the press.
The Lore
Explanations span the whole cryptozoological menu: a relict plesiosaur, a misread log or standing wave, gas-lifted plant matter, swimming livestock, even a mutation born of Patagonia's brush with nuclear research. None has closed the case, and polling reported from Bariloche has found roughly half the town's residents willing to believe there is something in the lake.
Bariloche has long since made peace with its monster. Nahuelito appears on souvenirs and tour boats, in headlines whenever a new blurry photograph surfaces, and in the town's sense of itself — a chocolate-and-ski resort with a plesiosaur in the basement. As the regional tourism literature admits, the enigma persists mostly as 'a healthy excuse to keep a man's curiosity awake.'
Field Notes
- ✦ George Garrett's c. 1910 sighting described a 5-7 m body standing 2 m out of the water.
- ✦ Periodically revived by blurry photographs and tourist reports; frequently compared to Nessie.
- ✦ The Buenos Aires Zoo mounted a plesiosaur-hunting expedition to the lake in 1922.
- ✦ The Argentine Navy reportedly chased an unidentified underwater object for 18 days in 1960.
- ✦ Mapuche tradition told of the cuero, a hide-like water beast, long before modern reports.
Case File
- Classification
- Lake cryptid
- Category
- Lake/Sea Monster
- Territory
- Lake Nahuel Huapi, Patagonia
- First Sighted
- 1910 (publicized 1922)
- Habitat
- Deep glacial lake waters
- Reported Size
- 5-15 m (16-50 ft) long
- Also Known As
- Nahuel Huapi monster · Patagonian plesiosaur