Southern Seclusion On a private island at the foot of Argentina’s Cordillera, a man-about-town has built a rustic lakefront retreat
By Colin Barraclough
Photos by Virginia Del Giudice
When Mallmann discovered secluded spits of land like this one on remote Lago La Plata, he knew he’d found his perfect escape.
Mallmann with the day’s catch: dappled brook trout
BACK IN THE EARLY 1980s, with Argentina in the grip of its cabal of generals, an up-and-coming Bariloche-born chef named Francis Mallmann ventured into deepest Patagonia in search of escape. Like many of his Argentinian peers, he yearned for breathing space, somewhere to savor Patagonia’s clean air, its seemingly endless steppe and soaring Andean peaks, even the long darkness of winter. “I was looking for remoteness,” says Mallmann.
In the glacier-scythed mountain passes of western Chubut province, he found it: an unnamed island in trout-filled Lago La Plata, a 60-mile, three-hour trip from the nearest town, Alto Río Senguerr, which is eight grueling hours from an airport. At this spot, 5,000 feet up in the Andean foothills, surrounded by snowcapped summits, with just a handful of peasant farmers as neighbors, Mallmann set about constructing a cabin.
Seeking protection from the fierce westerlies that whip across the lake from the Pacific, he chose the 25-acre island’s eastern tip and built his home with trunks of lenga, a deciduous species of southern beech. After completing the structure, he fleshed out the interior with rustic furniture, Chilean woven fabrics, and llama-wool throws. Even today, Mallmann admits, the cabin is so simple it resembles an outlaw’s hideout more than a country home for a metropolitan man: “I’ve had the place for half my life, and it’s still little more than a mountain hut.”
Now Argentina’s best-known chef, 52-year-old Mallmann, on the other hand, has changed radically in the years since. He cut his culinary teeth in France, during the eighties’ nouvelle-cuisine wave, but he returned to South America to help cultivate an endemic cooking tradition, championing the meats, fish, and game of Argentina’s Pampas and cordillera, which he prepares between two tiers of fire in an infiernillo, an Inca-inspired homemade oven. Eschewing complex concoctions in favor of the bold and the simple, he became the first non-European winner of the International Academy of Gastronomy’s prestigious Grand Prix de l’Art de la Cuisine in 1995 and has gone on to own a string of successful restaurants in Argentina, Uruguay, and the United States, including Patagonia West, in Westhampton Beach, New York.
Just back from a quiet day out
These days, Mallmann lives above Patagonia Sur, his diffusely lit, velvet-and-satin restaurant in La Boca, a rough-and-ready dockside neighborhood in Buenos Aires. (His daughter, Alexia, is maîtresse d’.) He also pays frequent visits to his prizewinning restaurant 1884, located at Mendoza winery Escorihuela Gascón, near the Argentinian-Chilean border. And more than ever, he spends extended trips driving his beloved Land Rover through Patagonia’s wilderness, where he scrawls poetry, writes cookbooks, and stages televised cooking shows, generally appearing alone, huddled over an open fire in some windswept clearing, roasting a freshly killed suckling pig or sautéing mushrooms gathered from a nearby copse.
Several times a year, Mallmann gathers family and friends at the Lago La Plata cabin, often journeying through snowdrifts, torrential rain, or floods. Even in good weather, the long drive from barren steppe to forested mountains is arduous. The trout-rich Río Senguerr points the way, first to angling haven Lago Fontana, then on to glacier-fed Lago La Plata, where the gravel track splutters to a dead end just a short hike from Argentina’s unmarked border with Chile. The final leg is a two-hour boat trip across turquoise water to the island. Mallmann revels in the logistical nightmare. “The Río Senguerr often floods after heavy rain or snow and washes away all the bridges,” he says with glee. “I have to lash the Land Rover to tree trunks and haul it through the current. Last time, the final 60 miles took me 18 hours.”
Patagonia lets big men think big. But beware: Ambitions can run riot in
a landscape that’s limited only by 1,900 miles of Atlantic cliffs to
the east and, far to the west, the untouched forests, raging creeks,
shimmering lakes, and sprawling glaciers of the Andean cordillera. With
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The reward is a landscape carved by ice and fire, replete with meltwater rivers, glaciers, volcanoes, and biodiverse Valdivian forest, a temperate rainforest unique to Patagonia’s cordillera. Around Lago La Plata, trails wend through stands of old-growth lenga and coihue, another species of southern beech, their trunks covered with mosses and lichens, the undergrowth a tangle of ferns, quila bamboo, and the occasional nalca, a ten-foot-wide giant rhubarb. Hidden waterfalls cascade through natural clearings that support an astonishing wealth of birdlife, including the majestic Andean condor, the tiny, irrepressible chucao, and the green-backed firecrown, the world’s most southerly hummingbird.
At the cabin, Mallmann begins each day by baking bread, then perhaps stringing a fly rod to hook a monster brook trout just yards from the house. “It’s such a joy,” he says with a smile. “You catch with every single cast.” Yet the location’s sheer wildness can be testing: The island receives a sopping 140 inches of rain and snow a year. (Seattle, with a mere 36 inches a year, is arid by comparison.) Its isolation, too, places a premium on nimble hands and quick wits. “You have to repair everything yourself,” says Mallmann, who kitted out a workshop to fix leaking pipes and collapsed chimneys. “After all, there’s no one to help for miles.”
In the balmy summers or in fall, when the lenga’s foliage explodes into a blaze of auburn and gold, days are spent tramping into the forest. In winter, when snowdrifts can top 18 feet, Mallmann and guests snap on nordic skis or hop onto a snowmobile for a foray in the woods. In poor weather, they withdraw to an open-wall belvedere nestled among the lenga to cook over crackling flames while they await a break in the clouds. He might be out there right now, watching the austral spring unfurl from darkest winter, throwing another trout on the fire, and listening to the silence of a Patagonia without people. “There’s no one out there,” he sighs happily. “It’s best that it stays that way.”
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