Patagonian Desert
Argentina's windswept cold-desert steppe at the southern tip of the Americas
At the storm-lashed end of South America lies the Patagonian Desert, the largest desert in the Americas and one of the coldest on Earth. Spreading across some 673,000 square kilometres of southern Argentina, it is a desert not of heat but of relentless wind, a treeless steppe of gravel and tough scrub stretching from the Andes to the Atlantic. The wind that screams off the mountains here is so constant and fierce that it has become the defining feature of the land, bending the sparse vegetation and scouring the plains.
The desert lies in the rain shadow of the Andes, which wring the moisture from Pacific storms before they cross. What falls on Patagonia is little, and much of it as snow. The terrain is a series of arid plateaus and tablelands, cut by river valleys and dropping in steps toward the sea. Guanacos, rheas, and burrowing armadillos move across the steppe, while the coastline shelters vast colonies of penguins, sea lions, and breeding southern right whales in the sheltered gulfs of Peninsula Valdes.
Long the territory of the Tehuelche and other Indigenous peoples, Patagonia drew European attention after Magellan's crews described its inhabitants, and Charles Darwin crossed its bleak expanses on the Beagle voyage, finding the monotony strangely haunting. Sheep ranching on enormous estancias later shaped its economy, drawing Welsh and other settlers, while its rock formations have yielded some of the largest dinosaur fossils ever found, including titanosaurs that ranked among the biggest animals to walk the Earth.