Argentina ranks as the world's eighth largest country. Standing between the tropic of Cancer and the most southerly reaches of the planet's landmass, it encompasses a staggering diversity of climates and landscapes. The mainland points down from the hot and humid jungles of its northeast and the bone-dry highland steppes of its northwest through windswept Patagonia to the end-of-the-world archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, a territory that is shared with Chile.
Argentina is less obviously exotic than its neighbours to the north, and its inhabitants will tell you how great an influence Europe has been on their nation. Yet it's a country with a very special character all of its own, distilled into the national ideal of Argentinidad – an elusive identity the country's Utopian thinkers and practical doers have never quite agreed upon.
Argentina's vibrant, wonderfully idiosyncratic capital, Buenos Aires is the third largest city in Latin America, yet it is a resolutely human kind of place. Famous for its tango, football and European-style architecture, it also holds hidden gems, including picturesque cobbled neighbourhoods, sophisticated shopping and some of the best and most varied cuisine in the whole continent.
The Northwest is a region of ochre deserts where flocks of llamas roam, charcoal-grey lava-flows devoid of any life form, blindingly white salt flats and sooty-black volcano cones, pristine limewashed colonial chapels set against striped mountainsides, lush citrus groves and emerald-green sugar plantations, impenetrable jungles populated by toucans and tapirs. One of the many colonial cities, Salta, is indisputably the region's tourism capital, with some of the country's best hotels and finest colonial architecture, while Jujuy is the best starting-point for exploring one of the country's most photogenic features, the multicoloured Quebrada de Humahuaca.
EL LITORAL is a region defined by its proximity to water. Its major attraction by far is the Iguazú Falls (shared with Brazil) in Misiones Province, whose claim to the title of the world's most spectacular waterfalls has few serious contenders.
As a place of extreme contrasts, Patagonia has few equals in the world: from the biting winds that howl off the gigantic Southern Patagonian Icecap to the comforting warmth of Patagonian hospitality. RN40, which runs parallel to the Andes. Two of the region's star attractions, a long way south, are the trekkers' and climbers' paradise of the Fitz Roy sector of the Parque Nacional Los Glaciares, accessed from El Chaltén; and the craggy blue face of the Glacier Perito Moreno, regularly cited as one of the world's natural wonders, situated near the town of El Calafate.
Tierra del Fuego, the "Land of Fire", is where South America finally funnels into the icy waters of the southern oceans, at the end of the inhabited globe. It gets its Spanish name from the fires that these people lit when Magellan and his crew first sailed fearfully through the newly discovered straits later to be named after him. Strictly, it comprises the entire archipelago to the south of Patagonia but the term is more commonly applied solely to the main, most developed island of the group, the Isla Grande, the biggest island in South America. Its eastern section, roughly a third of the island, along with a few islets, belong to Argentina, the rest being Chilean territory.
By far and away the leading tourist attraction is the well-known city of Ushuaia, a round-the-year resort on the south coast. Beautifully located, backed by distinctive jagged mountains, it is the base for visiting the Beagle Channel, rich in marine wildlife, and the wild, forested peaks of the Cordillera Darwin. With the lakes, forests and tundra of Parque Nacional Tierra del Fuego.
