TRAVELANDLEISUREASIA.COM / SEPTEMBER 2019 89
lives about six hours away,” she said. “A small
estancia. He is an old gaucho. He keeps some
cattle and sheep.”
“Is there a village?” I asked. I gazed across
the empty breadth of the wetlands to the
horizon, straight as a ruled line. In its
immensity, all sense of scale was lost.
“Just him. A single house, made of planks.
No electricity,” Maita said. “He lives alone. At
night he signals with a flashlight if he is
planning to visit us. Then the next day he will
turn up on his horse. He comes every year for
his birthday.”
“There is another neighbor as well,” she
went on, “two hours beyond Juan. He
announces his visits with smoke signals.”
“Smoke signals?”
“Apparently he doesn’t own a flashlight.”
A WETLAND WILDERNESS of more t ha n
13,000 square kilometers in northeastern
Argentina’s Corrientes province, Esteros del
Iberá is one of the most important freshwater
nature reserves in South America. The name
Iberá comes from the indigenous Guarani
language, still the lingua franca of Paraguay
a nd com mon ly spoken in t his pa r t of
Argentina. It means “glistening waters.”
Once upon a time, some 10,000 years ago,
the Paraná River flowed through Iberá, a vast
basin created by a tectonic depression. When
the river changed course, swinging away to the
north and west, it left behind a network of
channels and lagoons, many only a few yards
deep, threading around embalsados, or floating
islands. Today, Iberá is a world stripped to its
elements. Land, water, and sky unroll in
fathomless horizontals. It is a place half-made,
and hauntingly beautiful.
But there is more to Iberá than wetlands and
wildlife. The water channels, lagoons and
marshes are interspersed with highlands: dry
areas a few feet above the water level that are
often home to vast estancias—the cattle or
sheep ranches that are so central to Argentina’s
agricultural life. Iberá lies at the heart of
Corrientes, where the culture of the gaucho is
very authentic, having descended from the
Guarani people and Jesuit missions. Celebrated
in legend and literature, these men are as iconic
as North American cowboys: independent,
unruly, untamable. In Corrientes, all boys grow
up wa nting to be gauchos. Even boys in places
as far away as Ireland—where I grew up poring
over dog-eared magazine stories about splendid
fellows with neck scarves and battered hats—
could share that ambition. And some dreams
are impossible to escape. Which is what really
brought me to Iberá.THE DAY AFTER I met Maita at San Alonso,
I traveled by boat and jeep to the tiny outpost of
Concepción. The place felt like a 19th-century
American frontier town, with its sand streets
and single-story buildings. It was steeped in a
nostalgia that seemed to filter down through
the leaves of the old mango trees like dust. In a
backstreet I found La Alondra hotel, which
might have been lifted from a western movie
and styled by a hipster with an eye for antiques.
Outside on the porch, I sat with my chair tilted
back against the wall, watching the gauchos
and their horses trot past in the stillness of the
late afternoon.
I was about to set off on the next leg of my
trip, a horseback ride across Iberá, and it was
time to get fitted out with some appropriate
duds. So that evening I went down to the
general store—a splendid establishment where
the wares really do range from potbellied
stoves to bales of hay. I bought lpargatas, the