The main road lined by alpine wooden architecture made for a nice stroll on the first evening while we waited hungrily for the restaurant we booked to open for dinner at 9:30pm. Thankfully the offer of croissants, cakes, ice cream, cookies, chocolate, any kind of dessert, yoghurt, and pudding lavishly covered, filled, or otherwise refined with dulce de leche, a sickly sweet caramel cream, was impressive, and when we stumbled across a bacon-cheese scroll covered with dulce, I thought how in that sense Argentinians and Chileans were quite alike only that Chileans preferred mayonnaise to dulce.

At some point a few locals obviously realised that they were indeed missing out on a beautiful lakeside location with views of the snow-covered Andes and moved to Puerto, 3 kilometres south of the city centre, the only neighbourhood of Angostura featuring a pebble beach on the shores of Lago Nahuel Nuapi, that has become a place of pilgrimage especially on summer weekends. Puerto is also the starting point of a flat 13 kilometre-hiking trail (one-way) to the tip of Peninsula de Quetrihue in Parque Nacional Los Arrayanes through shady woodland on spongy forest floor with spectacular views of the turquoise lake.

One, if not the most noted highlight in this area is the Road of the Seven Lakes (Ruta de los Siete Lagos / RN 40) that runs Villa La Angostura to San Martín de los Andes.

A road trip on that last stretch divulged more of the scenery already admired in Bariloche and Villa la Angostura, and in between – gurgling streams, snow-capped peaks, and farmsteads amidst sparkling buttercup meadows and blooming gorse.

Most of the way was a dirt road yet road works were underway and our host later affirmed that the whole stretch would be asphalted by the coming year. I wasn’t sure whether to think of that as a good or bad thing.

Bumping along the dirt road, busy even in low season, engulfed in clouds of dust and suffering the rentals’ poor suspension was a pain at times, but I suspect the comfort of a sealed road might eventually increase traffic. It’s difficult to tell with roads.

It will be interesting to come back to Villa la Angostura in a few years and see how the Road of the Seven Lakes turned out for them. Everything about San Martín de los Andes however was charming and relaxed – the alpine style architecture, abundance of cafés specialised in using very large quantities of dulce de leche in their cakes, and its lakeside location with wonderful views unbothered by through traffic.